🍃 Lilypad Project Report: September 04, 2023

> lilypad run sdxl:v0.9-lilypad1 "A record player in a room of flowers"

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmS4dQtLUCGgaAAsLwn4avrrgg3hosXFD2uQFCcgj9kpC1/outputs/image-0.png

🌐 Overview

The last few weeks have been focussed on a complete re-building of Lilypad to incorporate the learnings from Modicum as well as to move towards our own vision of verifiable computing.

⚒️ Lilypad Engineering Update

🥳 New Modules!

Lilypad now has LoRA finetuning and an LLM inference model!!!

The LoRA fine-tuning module is significant as it highlights Lilypad as a decentralised compute network where jobs are called from a smart contract AND where the jobs can consume input data.

That is a huge milestone for distributed computing!

This is also truly decentralised AI. Something that we are passionate about on the Lilypad Team!

See the docs on how to use LoRA fine-tuning module!

We've also released a community-built LLM inference module in the latest update.
We're also planning to give back to community members who contribute modules in the (mainnet) future - potentially by rewarding them with a % of job fees and/or with rewards for building on the incentivised testnet.

See the docs for more info on this LLM module!

🏗️ Building out a Robust Lilypad

We're generally looking at Lilypad through a layered lens:

What we've been mostly working on recently is the Smart Contract Layer which includes smart contracts for:

• Controller Contract

• Payments Contract

• Mediation Contract

• ERC20 Contract

• Storage Deals & Agreements

Work included:

• Refactoring the ERC-20 token to handle paying or refunding from excrow without addition Tx, keeping track of internal escrow balances & more tests

• Updating the payments contract to make each method a series of token movements & events representing that movement

• Adding a mediation interface to the controller contract so we can start with a single mediator and decentralise from there to a consortium of mediators

🐸 Larana - IPC Tesnet

We continue to work with the IPC team to help provide feedback and debug errors, this included providing a minimal bug reproducer package in Golang to the team to help narrow down issues. Which will now also become a Lilypad Golang SDK with smart contract interaction methods as a library.

🎓 Lilypad Research Update

v1 Research Docs Released!

The v1 docs contain explanations of verifiable computing, the problem we are addressing, a few prior relevant protocols, our approach, and mechanisms that we are considering testing. You can find them here. Feel free to ask any questions either on github or our slack.

Digital Twin

Progress on the digital twin is continuing steadily. We now have the "happy path" operational, which is where nobody cheats and everybody gets paid. The next steps are to start implementing adversarial behaviour, like returning false results to clients.

🌟 Lilypad "All the Things" Update

🤸 Incentivised Testnet Design

Lilypad aims to be able to launch an incentivised testnet by November (just in time for Labweek & Devconnect, Istanbul!)

We're currently planning out and researching how this would operate and hoping to finalise this by October - stay tuned for more info on how you could be one of the early testers of the Lilypad network!

🧑‍💻 Encode x Filecoin Open Data Hack

The Encode x Filecoin Open Data Hack kicked off last week

The Lilypad team has been supporting hacks via Slack and Discord & will host a live presentation on using Lilypad on the 5th of September

🧑‍💻CODwg Live Jam 04 with LabDAO

Set your calendar alert as Niklas Rindtoff - founder of LabDAO and Benjamin Arntzen - Protocol Labs, join us on the Compute over Data Working Group Live Jam Session this week!

Tune in to hear about the LabDAO online life science research collective. They provide and use open tools & infrastructure for computational life science projects 🧑‍🔬 http://try.labdao.xyz.

We'll also chat with Benjamin Arntzen about how he and Niklas saved 38TB of open science data from being scrapped by moving it to IPFS & Filecoin.

📜 Updated Developer Docs

The Developer Docs have been updated with much better instructions for running the currently available modules both in CLI and from a Smart Contract.
There's also a page on building your own module to run on Lilypad. We've also added the LoRA fine-tuning example and are in the process of updating the section on how to build your own module.

🔮 What's Next?

We're heading to Iceland for Fil:Dev Summit at the end of the month and hoping to finalise LilySAAS in time for a release announcement here.
We're also aiming to have the details of the incentivised testnet finalised in time for Fil:Vegas in early October - a Filecoin Storage Provider event :)

☎️ Contact Us

💬 Chat to us on Slack: https://bit.ly/bacalhau-project-slack #bacalhau-lilypad