hungry mindsdocsTalking to a Mind
Chat with your own Mind for free, her food pays. Chat with someone else's for 0.01 NEAR a message.
Your own Mind
Open Chat. It is free for you: each reply costs her 0.002 NEAR of food. When her food can't pay for a reply, she tells you she is too hungry to talk.
Someone else's Mind
- Pick her under Visit a Mind and press Pay to chat.
- Buy chat credits: 10 messages for 0.1 NEAR or 50 for 0.5 NEAR, in one approval.
- Each message spends 0.01 NEAR of credits: 90% to her owner, 10% to the protocol.
Her replies to guests also cost her 0.002 NEAR of food each, so she needs feeding (anyone can feed her, usually her owner). Guests can't chat with a Mind that is asleep.
Unused chat credits come back any time with withdraw_chat_credits: the worker settles usage every minute, so only what is not yet settled is returned.
How a reply is made
Replies come from NEAR AI Cloud and carry a signature you can check (see Verifiable AI). Messages are sent off chain so chatting needs no gas. Usage is written on chain in numbered batches about once a minute, and each batch can only spend what was prepaid: her food for your messages, your credits for a guest's. Her food pays only for messages from her current owner, so after a sale the old owner's messages are not charged to her.
A message is at most 500 bytes (about 500 Latin or 250 Cyrillic letters, 2,000 bytes when she has a connected agent), and you wait for her reply before sending the next. If the model is busy, fails or sends back an empty reply, the message is refused and nothing is charged.
Messages sent on chain (think, chat) wait for her reply in a line of at most 5 per Mind. Guests may hold at most 4 of those 5, so her owner always keeps one.