Dialogue with Sahara AI Co-founder: The times are pressing for the future of AI, and Web3 has provided the answer.

Written by: Shenchao TechFlow

In 2025, compared to topics like stablecoins, token stocks, and crypto treasuries that firmly occupy market attention, Web3 AI seems to exist in a “niche.”

But even in this narrow gap, we can still see that some quality projects are insisting on construction, stepping out of the AI Meme hype, exploring the real-world application of Web3 AI, and achieving good results. Sahara AI, which is dedicated to enabling everyone to participate in AI and benefit from contributing to AI, is one of them.

In March, the Sahara AI data service testnet launched its third season, with the number of registered test users exceeding 3.5 million.

In June, Sahara AI launched the $SAHARA community subscription event on Buildpad, attracting over 30,000 KYC certified users from 118 countries worldwide, with an oversubscription of 777%;

Subsequently, $SAHARA was listed on several major global exchanges including Binance, Coinbase, Upbit, and Bithumb, and has repeatedly ranked in the top three on Upbit, South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange, with trading volume only second to BTC and XRP.

What has led Sahara AI to gain widespread recognition in both capital and user dimensions?

With questions in mind, we engaged in an in-depth conversation with Tyler Zhou, co-founder and COO of Sahara AI.

Speaking of the current development situation of Web3 AI, Tyler expressed his strong optimism about Web3 AI:

There are indeed too many projects in the market that simply package existing AI tools and issue tokens; this approach holds little value. However, I firmly believe that the next big direction for AI will definitely be in Web3. Web3 AI is a foundational technology that can change the way the entire industry operates.

In analyzing the driving forces behind Sahara AI's impressive achievements, Tyler stated:

Sahara AI makes users feel for the first time that AI is no longer an unattainable thing, but a tool that can bring real benefits. I believe we are the only AI project that has successfully implemented a sustainable business model. In the future, our focus will be on how to truly integrate AI into people's daily lives.

In this issue, let us follow the perspective of Tyler Zhou, who is at the forefront of AI entrepreneurship, to explore the feelings and thoughts behind Sahara AI's creation of a sustainable development model that meets user needs, is recognized by the market, and receives positive feedback in the context of the new era of AI.

The core opportunity of AI: as a real yield tool, benefiting every participant.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Thank you for your time. Sahara AI has received a lot of attention this year. Could you please briefly introduce Sahara AI first?

Tyler:

When people ask me what Sahara AI is, my favorite answer is: Sahara AI is the AI of the new era.

This is not a high-falutin concept. Our original intention in creating Sahara AI is very simple: to allow everyone interested in AI to truly participate. Whether you are a regular user hearing about AI for the first time, a developer already writing code, or even an AI enterprise, you can find your place in the Sahara AI ecosystem.

Currently, our platform has over 3.2 million accounts, with daily active users exceeding tens of thousands. What are these users doing?

Some people are making money by doing data annotation, some are deploying their own trained AI models, and businesses have found customized AI solutions here. Many users have told us that this is the first time they feel AI is no longer something distant, but rather a tool that can bring them real benefits.

This real user demand also explains why we can simultaneously gain support from so many top exchanges. The market is smart because it sees an ecosystem that is truly creating value.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Could you share some of your experiences before creating Sahara AI? What insights drove you to create the Sahara AI project? Were you chasing a trend, or was it based on a deeper belief?

Tyler:

During the years I was an investor, I specifically researched AI and examined hundreds of AI projects and products, including both Web3 and Web2.

At the beginning of 2023, after ChatGPT became popular, I discovered an interesting phenomenon: the entire AI data labeling industry suddenly faced a shortage. Before that, the traditional costs of data labeling had always been high, especially for projects that needed to handle complex datasets. Just the data preparation aspect was a headache for many small and medium-sized teams, and quality was hard to control, often leading to inconsistent labeling.

In terms of revenue, the traditional model in the past involved the platform charging high fees to customers while the data labeling workers received very low compensation, leading to an imbalanced distribution of value. This approach itself has inherent issues.

In my opinion, the core opportunity does not lie in “creating a new tool application,” but in redesigning the value distribution mechanism of AI. If we can rebuild this process in a Web3 manner, allowing people from around the world to participate, ensuring that contributors receive fair compensation, and making the entire process transparent and traceable, we can address both the fundamental issues of supply shortages and unreasonable value distribution.

At that time, I had a conversation with another co-founder of Sahara AI, Professor Sean, about this idea and found that our thoughts were very aligned. He saw the bottleneck of AI development from an academic perspective, while I identified the issues with the business model from an investment perspective. The combination of these two viewpoints led to the basic framework of Sahara AI as it is now.

It can be clearly stated that the establishment of Sahara AI is absolutely based on belief and has nothing to do with chasing trends. From the very beginning, Sahara AI has carried a mission: to truly integrate the development of AI into everyone's life, allowing every participant to benefit.

The next big direction for AI will definitely be in Web3.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Some views believe that Web3 AI is fundamentally useless and the projects are not very promising; however, others feel that the next big direction for AI will definitely emerge from Web3. What is your perspective on these two completely different statements?

Tyler:

Based on the thoughts just mentioned, I can understand both of these completely different viewpoints.

Frankly speaking, I understand why some people think Web3 AI is useless; there are indeed too many projects on the market that simply wrap existing AI tools and issue tokens, and this approach obviously has no value.

But I firmly believe that the next major direction of AI will definitely be in Web3, because I think the most core issue with AI right now is the unreasonable distribution of value, while the greatest value of Web3 lies in allowing every contributor to receive the rewards they deserve. Additionally, AI itself requires global collaboration, with data coming from all over the world, computing power distributed in different locations, and developers being global. Traditional centralized models find it hard to truly achieve this kind of open collaboration, but Web3 exists inherently to solve this problem.

Based on this, what Sahara AI does is actually very straightforward: we have built a complete infrastructure to support this new collaborative model, allowing hundreds of thousands of daily active users to truly collaborate and create value on our platform, while also establishing a sustainable economic cycle to ensure that every participant can receive a fair return.

This future has yet to fully arrive, and it is just the right time for people like us to create it.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In the past two years, AI projects have emerged, but their performance in the secondary market has been lackluster. How do you interpret this phenomenon?

Tyler:

In each market cycle, the points at which everyone FOMO varies.

Taking Pyth Network as an example, everyone knows that oracles are a major trend, and investors are also optimistic. However, the performance of tokens in the past few years has been average, and the market has not matured yet. Just a few days ago, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced a partnership with Pyth Network to put key economic indicators like quarterly GDP on the blockchain, which has led to increased global attention for Pyth Network, and its price has doubled.

It's like in 2010, when everyone knew that electric vehicles were the future, and Tesla's concept was very advanced, but those who bought Tesla stocks during those years had a hard time. It wasn't because electric vehicles weren't valuable; it was because battery technology wasn't mature enough, charging stations hadn't been widely deployed, and the entire ecosystem needed time.

Web3 AI shares similarities with oracle technology; they are not just a single track, but rather underlying technologies that can change the way entire industries operate. This is similar to how smartphones did not just add a touchscreen, but rather restructured the entire digital lifestyle. Such elements that can drive fundamental evolution in an industry will surely have their day of explosion.

The current challenge is that the infrastructure is still not perfect, and there are too few projects that can truly run a business model. Most AI projects are still at the conceptual stage and have not solved real problems, so the market will certainly not buy into them.

But this is exactly the opportunity. We are currently preparing the foundational conditions before the real explosion arrives. When the market truly begins to pay attention to AI, Sahara AI will have already accumulated users, achieved data breakthroughs, and built a complete ecosystem. At that time, the value will naturally be reflected.

Run through sustainable business models, allowing AI to truly enter daily life.

Deep Tide TechFlow: As the only AI project listed on both major Korean exchanges, how do you view the influence of Sahara AI in the Korean market? And in the “New Era AI” concept you shared, where do you think Sahara AI fits into that?

Tyler:

The most intuitive feedback comes from users, and the feedback from the Korean market is the most convincing: on Upbit, $SAHARA has repeatedly ranked in the top three for trading volume, and its trading activity has remained high. Korean users are representative; they are voting with real money, conveying to the broader market that Sahara AI is their chosen AI representative.

Now, we have millions of active users on the platform, many of whom earn $SAHARA rewards through data labeling and then use these tokens to do more within the ecosystem. In the future, tokens will be applied more broadly in AI agent calls, AI asset access, and authorization, achieving an economic model of internal circulation that allows participants to truly feel the practical role of tokens. Coupled with the team's background and execution capability, this brings more confidence to the community.

From a business perspective, I believe we are the only AI project that has successfully implemented a sustainable business model. Sahara AI not only has over 40 enterprise clients on the B side paying for our services, but C-side users can actually make money on our platform. We do not rely on subsidies to maintain a false prosperity; we only engage in a healthy value cycle.

It may still be early to talk about leaders in the field, as the AI race has just begun, and many excellent projects will certainly emerge in the future. However, I believe that in 5 to 10 years, there will not be many AI projects that truly remain, but a few will become very large. Projects that rely on conceptual hype will gradually disappear, while those that genuinely solve infrastructure issues and build sustainable models will become stronger.

Sahara AI's current goal is to continue solidifying the foundation, allowing more people to participate in the new era of AI through us. As for whether it can eventually become a true leader, time will provide the answer.

Deep Tide TechFlow: What direction will Sahara AI take next? Could you please share Sahara AI's future plans and what it is currently preparing to do?

Tyler:

Sahara AI's next focus will be to explore how AI can truly integrate into people's daily lives.

You see, ChatGPT now has 800 million users every week, and ordinary people are starting to say “I'll ChatGPT it” just like they used to say “I'll Google it.”

As these AI models become closer to people's thinking patterns, businesses are beginning to truly use AI to conduct business and solve real problems, making high-quality training data increasingly scarce. Everyone wants to train their own models so that AI better understands their business, but quality data that fits specific scenarios is hard to find, and most of it is controlled by a few large platforms. This gives us an opportunity.

What Sahara AI needs to do is seize this window of opportunity, so the next focus will be on two directions:

First, promote the DSP model across the entire AI value chain, such as financial data, DeFi transactions, imaging, content creation, etc.

Second, turn this data into tradable assets.

We officially launched DSP at the end of July. In addition to the original early partners like Myshell and Camp Network, we have added more than a dozen project partners who are gradually integrating into DSP. Since the start of the testnet, the platform has accumulated over 200,000 contributors, completing 8 million data labeling tasks with an accuracy rate exceeding 92%. Through our dual reward mechanism, the total reward pool on the platform has surpassed several hundred thousand dollars, including rewards from partners like Myshell and Camp Network.

We have discovered an interesting phenomenon: the demand from enterprise clients for this transparent data service is much greater than expected. There are more and more projects waiting in line to access the DSP, as they find that they can obtain higher quality data through us, and the entire process is traceable and verifiable.

The entire AI industry is still in the infrastructure construction phase, but I can feel that a turning point is approaching. When AI truly begins to be applied commercially on a large scale, the value of data will grow exponentially.

The layouts we are doing now are to prepare for that moment.

Deep Tide TechFlow: As a successful entrepreneur, what are the most troublesome issues you face based on the currently challenging entrepreneurial environment?

Tyler:

The question I think about the most every day should be: how to help participants make money in Sahara AI.

Many people may think that the hardest part of starting a business is financing, marketing, or sales, but for me, these are not the most important issues. The question I think about the most every day is: Are people really feeling that the AI experience is smoother because of Sahara AI, that opportunities are fairer, and that they finally see returns for the value they contribute?

To understand this issue, I registered many small accounts and observed what everyone was discussing in the community and on X: when I see someone finding the product useful and making money through annotations, I feel very happy; however, when I see someone complaining about a certain feature being difficult to use, I immediately note it down for the team to improve. Many times, I even engage in discussions with everyone in various trading groups to understand their true thoughts.

For me, feedback is more important than anything else, because I want users to feel for the first time that AI is no longer just the privilege of experts, but something they can also participate in and benefit from. Data contributors should also realize that labeling work is a valuable asset and should no longer be seen as cheap labor.

I am well aware that whether it's our community members or token holders, they follow us with the hope of having actual participation and benefits, rather than just listening to grand visions. If an ordinary user works hard on our platform for a whole day and ends up with nothing, then all our technology and concepts are meaningless.

This may not sound very impressive, but I think it's the most important thing. Only when users truly benefit can Sahara AI truly go far in a meaningful way.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In the context of the accelerating integration of Web2 and Web3, based on Sahara AI's rich accumulation in Web2 AI and Web3 AI, what opportunities do you think AI will have in the future? What challenges will follow?

Tyler:

Frankly speaking, the integration of Web2 and Web3 is indeed happening in the AI field, but this process is slower than expected.

The biggest opportunity I see is for AI to truly enter daily life and for its value to be certified and distributed through Web3.

For example, when investing, you may spend a lot of time watching market trends and analyzing data, but in the future, AI assistants will keep an eye on the market for you, alerting you to opportunities and even providing suggestions directly. When it comes to self-media or writing, AI can not only write articles but also help you promote them, interact with fans, and even handle business collaborations.

More importantly, Web3 allows AI to be personal assets, not just tools. Just like buying a house can generate rental income, the AI you train and the data you contribute can earn you money when others use it. For example, if you use AI to analyze a certain industry, you can receive ongoing revenue when others access that model.

We are collaborating with well-known projects to create solutions that truly bring AI into everyday life, such as providing users with AI smart suggestions while using wallets and offering creators a full suite of AI solutions from content generation to revenue management.

Of course, the challenges are also obvious: on the technical level, the current blockchain performance does not meet the high-frequency calling needs of AI; on the user experience level, there are still barriers for ordinary people; on the business model level, it will take time to verify how to make this new value distribution method truly sustainable.

These challenges are actually opportunities for Sahara AI. We are now solving these problems in advance, allowing the infrastructure to bear them, so that ordinary users can use it without needing to understand the technology, achieving a sustainable business model.

I think that in a few years, professional knowledge and even everyday behavioral patterns may become valuable AI components, and Sahara AI is likely to be the infrastructure of this new economy.

Even if you don't actively embrace AI, AI will reshape your life.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In the face of opportunities and challenges, what suggestions do you have for ordinary people to participate in AI?

Tyler:

Regarding how ordinary people can participate in AI, I think this is not a matter of choice, but just a matter of time.

Just like the transition from Yahoo to Google back in the day, at first, everyone thought search engines were pretty much the same, but gradually you would realize that Google is indeed more user-friendly, and then everyone around you is using it, so you naturally switch over.

AI is the same; in the coming years, it will gradually permeate various scenarios, used in investment, work, and creation. This is a very natural process.

For friends who want to get in touch early, Sahara AI now provides a good entry point.

My suggestion is simple: if you're interested in AI, why not try it out now? The cost is low, the learning curve is not steep, but it will allow you to get familiar with this new way of working in advance. Just like those who started using Google early on; although it seemed like just switching search engines, they actually gained a better experience.

I have always believed that even if individuals do not actively embrace AI, AI will actively integrate into and reshape our lives. In the future, whether in work, learning, investment, or socializing, AI is gradually becoming an indispensable part of it.

Sahara AI aims to provide such an entry point to experience and engage with AI in advance, allowing users to enter this new stage at the lowest cost and in the most natural way.