There's a audio version of this blog post, hosted on YouTube:
Thinking about DIEM as a car…
Imagine you are looking for a mode of transport because you need to get around. You’re not sure exactly how far you need to go, but you do have a rough plan, you need to commute to the Office on weekdays, go the shops sometimes and occasionally do a road-trip.
There’s a bunch of car shops, but there’s this one shop called VeniceAI that has a car on sale called DIEM that has some really rather special properties….
The price of the car depends entirely on the size of the petrol tank. For each $140 you spend on the car you get a petrol tank sized such that it can drive it 1 mile per day. If you spend $1400 on the car, you can drive it 10 miles today, 10 miles tomorrow, 10 miles every day forever. At midnight, your petrol tank magically fills up back to the top. When the petrol runs out the car stops working. But the thing is, you know the Office is only 4 miles away, so 10 miles is perfect for you. Your daily commute is sorted... Pretty cool car right? But wait, there’s a couple more cool things about the car….
Every few weeks, the car gets a little bit better. The car periodically gets faster, again and again. Some weeks it suddenly gets a juicy new feature like heated seats, a bigger boot, a roof rack. You never know what cool thing your car is going to have when you wake up tomorrow, but you can be confident little enhancements are going to keep occurring. Every now and again, your car is going to get a big enhancement - perhaps it can suddenly talk to you? Or perhaps the back seats can suddenly play video, who knows!
To be honest, it’s not the best car on the road but when you pop the hood of your car, the engine is laid out bare for you to see and inspect, not like some other cars where the engine is encased in a plastic cover, completely opaque to how it’s actually working. Your car is open-source. There’s no hidden trackers in your car. Your car does not report your location back to the insurance company. Your car does not spy on your driving style. Your car is not suddenly going to refuse to drive down a certain road. Your car is not suddenly going to repaint itself with a huge banner, advertising the latest movie. Your car is not going to show you popup Ads on the Heads-up Display. It may not be the fastest car on the road, but it doesn’t invade your privacy or censor where you drive.
Pretty compelling car right? But wait, I haven’t told you the best things about the car yet.
When you no longer need your car so much, for example you start working from home and no longer need to commute, you can downsize your petrol tank and sell back your mileage quota and re-coup your initial investment. It’s like a car that does not depreciate in value. It keeps it’s second hand value. The car is like an asset rather than a liability, it’s not a money pit like most cars. This makes it very flexible. You suddenly want to go on a road-trip - no problem. Pay a one-off sum for a boost in daily mileage. It’s like the petrol tank suddenly gets bigger. It has no maximum size, and however big it is it still gets magically filled back up with Petrol at midnight. Drive like crazy around the whole country, and when you come back from your trip, you can down-size the tank and sell your mileage back without any cost penalty.
If DIEM was a car, it’d be a pretty interesting kind of car.
The DIEM token is a pretty interesting way to get AI thinking time. Buying DIEM is buying a life-time subscription to Venice AI. if you are an owner of DIEM, you can access models served from the VeniceAI API. That’s how Venice has turned AI into an asset you can truly own.