Bankless: Why Does Artificial Intelligence Need the Values of Cryptocurrency?
The future of artificial intelligence is uncertain, but one thing is for sure: it needs to be built on a foundation of trust and transparency through open source.Original Title: “Why AI Needs Crypto's Values”
Author: Arjun Chand
Compiled by: Kate, Mars Finance
Artificial intelligence technology is developing rapidly; it needs to adopt the values of cryptocurrency.
The tech industry's dream of an AI revolution has always been a double-edged sword.
Unleashing AI can solve some of humanity's greatest challenges, but it can also concentrate power in dangerous ways.
This is where crypto and blockchain come into play. The values that make cryptocurrency cool can also help AI become better. These values can help AI build a fairer, safer, and more open future.
Decentralization, permissionless innovation, open-source systems, privacy, transparency, user ownership. These are not just fancy words; they have the potential to open the black box of AI.
This is why the AI industry needs the magic of cryptocurrency.
Building an Inclusive and Open AI Ecosystem
Currently, a few large tech companies control most of the computing power and are building moats around their AI research. This creates an "AI mafia" that stifles innovation and competition faster than you can say "walled garden."
However, decentralization is the ultimate plot twist.
In a decentralized AI paradigm, computing power and AI research are permissionless. AI becomes a tool for everyone, breaking down the barriers set by the AI mafia, democratizing access to knowledge, tools, and resources.
Sharing resources means more people can participate in tackling AI's most daunting challenges. The more diverse the builders, the less bias in algorithms, which is a win for everyone.
https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1762318512507208182
However, open-source development has always struggled to be profitable. If people can't make money from it, how do you get them to create great things? This often forces companies to close their source code and pursue profit.
"Decentralized AI with crypto incentives" solves this problem.
Cryptocurrency provides new monetization methods for open-source AI. It creates an open market for AI development, ensuring token access and rewarding contributions.
For example, in decentralized AI networks like Bittensor, developers can earn TAO tokens when they use their machine learning models in various AI applications.
This dynamic allows decentralized AI networks to attract top talent through tokenized incentives, creating a sustainable value chain that does not exist in closed-source, centralized models.
Ensuring User Data Privacy
We live in a data-hungry world. Everyone wants your data to understand your likes and dislikes, and then use it to sell you things.
AI is no exception. AI systems require vast amounts of data to function properly. Large AI companies often store entire conversation histories to train their models and improve services, but this creates significant privacy issues.
Imagine all your personal information—shopping habits, browsing history, even health records—being thrown into a giant AI pot. You have to trust that the company won't misuse or sell this information. Scary, right?
To truly gain user trust, AI needs to adopt privacy-preserving technologies. Building trust requires transparency and verifiability, and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) can help achieve this.
AI projects in the crypto space are also adopting other privacy-preserving technologies. For instance, Venice.ai only stores session records in the user's browser and ensures that user requests are encrypted. GPU providers process these requests, but no server sees the entire conversation history or knows the user's identity.
By integrating these cryptographic methods and values, we can create AI systems that respect user privacy and data ownership.
How do we train AI models while maintaining privacy without using user data? Without enough data, AI cannot understand real-world situations well, leading to "AI hallucinations," where AI produces incorrect outputs.
This is where synthetic data comes in. Synthetic data is artificially generated through algorithms that simulate real data. It has the privacy-preserving characteristic of not exposing personal information. All major AI companies are using it, and it is an emerging research field.
Cryptocurrency can incentivize the creation of synthetic datasets for AI models through crowdsourced work. Users contribute verified data points to earn tokens, addressing the issue of insufficient training data.
For example, projects like Synthetic AI build tools for creating synthetic data, allowing users to contribute synthetic data and earn SAI tokens. Ensuring the quality of these datasets can significantly accelerate efforts to generate data for training AI models while maintaining user data privacy.
Conclusion
The future of AI is uncertain, but one thing is clear: it needs to be built on a foundation of trust and transparency through open source.
Cryptocurrency's focus on decentralized ownership, permissionless access, and privacy provides the missing piece. The tools are already available; it's time to use them and write the next chapter of the AI story.
Can the values of cryptocurrency improve the AI industry? Please comment below and let us know your thoughts!
