Earlier this week, the Render Foundation announced a new AI Scouts program focused on helping Render accelerate collaborations with startups creating next-generation AI tools that leverage the Render Network’s decentralized compute power.
To kick off the program, the Render Network held its first Wednesday AMA series on the Render Network Discord led by Head of Comms, Andrew Hyde and featuring AI Scouts: Paul Roales (Proales), Danny Newman, and Nate Solomon (N8Solomon). The AMA covered a range of exciting topics including the future of AI, details on the AI Scouts’ backgrounds and the dynamic intersection of AI, blockchain, and the creative industries.
This post serves as a follow-up to our recent Meet the Scouts post, providing a more detailed recap of highlights from this week’s AMA and include direct responses from the AI scouts.
Getting to know the AI Scouts
The first half of the AMA was focused on introducing the AI scouts to the Render Community, giving space for them to discuss their pervious experiences in AI, web3, and next generation media. The conversation also explored the ways the scouts will be interfacing with developers and the Render community at large.
Paul
“What drew me into AI? I first started working with machine learning around 2014–2015, when I modified an early GAN to drive some LED artwork I was building. It was just so mind blowing how fun it was to interact with the system, guide it and push it and mess around and still get great visual renderings out.”
— Paul Roales during Render Discord AMA
Paul is based in San-Francisco, began his journey into AI in 2014–2015 by adapting early GANs to create LED art installations. These projects evolved into high-profile showcases, including Google I/O.
A hands-on coder, Paul worked at Waymo and contributed to self-driving car technologies. With a rich history of art installations like Sonic Runway at Burning Man to complement deep technical skills in machine learning, he’s currently exploring new integrations for Render and developing a paper on the network’s future work in AI.
The work later turned into a piece displayed at Google IO in 2016 titled ‘Quantum Duality’.
Danny
“I was part of a location intelligence company where we looked at millions of data points of user location data to infer interests, demographics, and bubble up useful info. More recently I’ve been deep in the conversational AI space and excited to see the progress in that space. I’m very excited about the near term possibilities in the intersection of where Render has been and where AI is going. How can our community of 3D/VFX/Creatives enhance and lower barriers for their projects.”
- Danny Newman
During the AMA, Danny discussed his expertise in location intelligence and conversational AI, and explored ideas about using Render’s GPU power for tasks like image recognition, generative workflows, and customer call analysis. He’s passionate about prototyping and testing ambitious ideas, having developed a number of cutting edge media startups.
Nate
“I played around with ChatGPT when it first came out, but I really went down the rabbit hole when AI started helping me learn how to program. I went from being a pretty bad developer to now building fully functional apps. The crazy part is how much better these tools are getting and how they’re helping me become a more efficient builder.”
- Nate Solomon
With the Render community, Nate discussed the ways he will contribute to Render, with a focus on helping with integrations into AI and DePIN projects. He also descried his journey into AI and blockchain, coding work, early use of tools like ChatGPT, and experiences that will help spearheading collaborations between Render and Solana developers.
Highlights from the AMA
The scouts discussed some upcoming initiatives that they will be focusing, and goals for increasing AI integrations on the network
Paul: RenderCon 2025 will unveil some announcements about bridging creative and AI communities. The daily opportunities at the intersection of ML and blockchain are inspiring and will play a role in Render’s next steps.
Danny: The short-term focus is scaling Render’s infrastructure to support use cases like image recognition, generative workflows, and customer call analysis. Early projects will test onboarding and refine internal processes.
As part of this discussion the scouts explored key use cases and partnerships that they wanted to focus on in the near term, and explained why they were good uses of the network.
AI Training and Inference: Render has potential for decentralized AI training and inference, with ongoing discussions around implementing these capabilities.
Overflow compute for AI: Companies like Midjourney and RunwayML could offload non-paying or low-priority tasks to Render’s GPU network.
Community Discussions
Throughout the session, the community provided some feedback for ways the Scouts could interface with the wider Render ecosystem, including:
- Onboarding Interface with Solana Projects: Simplifying access for Solana developers to integrate with Render GPUs in just a few clicks.
- Grant Support: The AI Scouts are actively assisting grant recipients with technical support to ensure successful project launches.
After the AMA, a number of Render community members share recaps, analysis, and ideas based on the conversation. We’ve collected some amazing X threads from across the Render community discussing the future of the AI Scouts program and the growth of the Render Network’s decentralized compute platform.
@renderpockets shares his excitement for the future of the network with a few takeaways from the chat.
@jayjaykan shared a offer a glimpse in his discussion with AI Scout Danny
Nate (N8solomon) joined the discussion to introduce himself to the wider Render Network community that was not online during the AMA
What’s Next?
- RenderCon 2025: The one-day event will showcase the network’s future potential
- Efforts are underway to onboard new compute partners and expand capabilities beyond rendering tasks
- The team is exploring partnerships with Solana developers and large-scale AI companies
Join the Weekly Discord AMAs
The next weekly Wednesday AMA and hangout on January 29th will bring more updates from the AI Scouts. Also, get your earlybird tickets to Render Con and meet the AI scouts in person: https://lu.ma/rendercon
Join the Render Network Discord and stay tuned for announcements.
