Bitrecs is a novel recommendation engine built on the Bittensor network. This implementation provides a framework for serving realtime e-commerce recommendations using LLMs. Miners are encouraged to experiment with their own implementations to improve latency and quality.
Maximize sales for online retailers (merchants)
Common objectives shared by merchants:
- Increase add to carts (engagement)
- Increase the number of customers who complete an order (conversion rate)
- Increase the average size of cart (average order value)
This subnet is dedicated to maximizing these 3 goals for online merchants using existing store data and traffic (onsite).
Global e-commerce is an estimated 20T market with a ~15% CAGR. A large portion of online sales are directly attributed to onsite recommendations (e.g customers who bought x also bought y, bundled products, last minute checkout items etc). Famously, Amazon attributes 35% of their total online sales to their proprietary recommendation engine. Unfortunately this engine is out of reach for most online retailers who are operating on smaller platforms (e.g Shopify, Woocommerce etc) which have their own recommendation solutions and widgets, often using older rules-based technology.
This problem is a subset of the much larger General Recommendations space which powers most of the Internet today (e.g Netflix movie recommendations, TikTok reels, Google search suggestions, etc)
We are addressing a more narrow but vital area of e-commerce - onsite product recommendations for merchants
Tap the intelligence of Bittensor to generate realtime product recommendations for online merchants.
The first generation solution uses prompting and ICL via a Mixture of Experts to coerce recs from the latest LLMs. With a rapidly declining cost per token, we believe LLM's are well suited for this task as they excel at cold-start, zero/few shot learning
V1 uses a simple prompt template but should evolve rapidly as miners are onboarded. Additionally, many LLM's have encoded valuable information about shopping cohorts, seasonality, brand affinities, customer journeys etc which we try to unlock using prompting.
The solution has been designed to offer merchants a free and simple plugin that works out of the box, while hiding all the complexity and abstractions of Bittensor away from them so they can continue to focus on selling and running an online business. Subnet miners can focus on competing and evolving the prompting to produce increasingly valuable and timely product recommendations.
Validators provide the gateway to the miners, which send and collect requests through the network, scoring them and selecting a top candidate to return to the client.
The subnet operates through an incentive mechanism where miners produce arrays of product SKUs from a given input SKUs, a catalog of store inventory and prompting. The protocol enables:
- Simple integration for e-commerce merchants through our plugins
- Base miner class with support for several popular LLM model providers
- Validator API proxy for marshalling requests between e-commerce sites and the bittensor network
The incentive mechanism ranks miner responses by performance metrics and sales events such as:
- Latency to response
- Diversity of recs
- Quality of responses
- Coherence to prompt parameters
- End user actions such as add to cart and purchases
We think this is a great opportunity to showcase the power of Bittensor incentives with e-commerce and to create a fully aligned network of parties - an elegant flywheel of value. The barrier to entry for miners is low on this network as a GPU is not required to mine. Miners are allowed (and often encouraged) to call LLMs via APIs as the initial bootstrap of the network will mostly be driven for speed and accuracy.
Over time, as the baseline gets set (i.e quality recs at a max request time < 3 seconds) the sales focused incentive mechanism drives miners to search and compete for more impactful recommendations. We hope that we can fine tune and balance the incentive mechanism to achieve a network that is always performing a 'best effort' on every request, with outsized rewards given to top performers which drive real, measurable value for merchants and helping them compete with the incumbents - a win for every party involved.
As we evolve this network we get closer to 1-to-1 marketing which is viewed as the holy grail of marketing (imagine every product page you view on the web as personalized just for you, without being invasive or exploitative). Amazon is close to this experience but falls short in many areas - they often directly sell the same products their merchants sell and this arguably creates a conflict of interest when they recommend products.
Smaller retailers need access to this technology to remain competitive, and our solution is built to work with existing onsite catalogs (we never recommend 3rd party products or divert traffic to other sites - this is critical to winning merchants trust)
Merchants put enormous time and $ into their online stores, constantly updating and polishing them to make them convert higher. These are fantastic websites to showcase Bittensor technology as they generally are very well designed, work across many devices, are fast and are often being updated with new products/services.
We hope to achieve a state where customers happy to get better overall recommendations, merchants win with higher sales and conversions and miners/validators are rewarded for best effort on every request.
Bitrecs does not use, collect or farm any customer data, PII or anything related to the end user which would otherwise be considered invasive or intrusive. Our solution is privacy preserving, with final control of what data gets sent to the network in the merchants hands via the plugin. By default, minimal, anonymous information is gathered to generate the recommendations.
Testnet (Jan)
- launch testnet with v1 engine supporting Shopify/Woocommerce
- iterate, refine and balance incentive mechanism
- complete merchant/miner/validator portal for easy onboarding
- launch on mainnet
- establish baselines for quality of service and uptime across the subnet
- ramp up miners and validators
- improve and harden onsite metrics tracking
- aggressively market and onboard merchants
- integrate additional platforms (magento, bigcommerce, wix)
- evolve the V1 engine with new prompting and models, miner innovations
- improve plugins
- overall UX, reskin and make the experience more delightful for merchants
Want to earn tao by mining? Check out our mining guide to get started.
Interested in running a validator? See our validator setup instructions for details.
Ensure you have the sample .json and .csv files in the /tests/data folder
pytest ./tests/test_json.py -s --durations=0
pytest ./tests/test_llm.py -s --durations=0
pytest ./tests/test_llm_2.py -s -k 'test_call_local_llm_with_20k'
Recommendation Engine Perplexity
This repository is licensed under the MIT License.
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