AI & Blockchain: An Introduction

Matt Turck, FirstMark Capital
June 28, 2018
AI & Blockchain: An Introduction
Brains and Chains:
aiblockchainconf.com

Early stage venture capital firm based
in New York City
Machine Learning & AI
Crypto & Blockchain
SELECT FIRSTMARK
INVESTMENTS
MATT TURCK
Managing Director
Twitter: @mattturck
Blog: mattturck.com

Defining Technologies of the Last Decade
Social
Mobile Cloud

But Only Obvious in Hindsight
AWS = $17.5B in revenues
(2017)

Defining Technologies of the Next Decade
IoT
(intelligent
infrastructure,
autonomous
transportation, IIoT,
robotics)
Blockchain
(decentralized
infrastructure,
apps, crypto
tokens)
AI
(ML, data science,
big data)
AI
Blockchain IoT

AI + Blockchain: Strange Bedfellows?
Crypto is libertarian,
AI is communist
- Peter Thiel
“
“
Crypto is anarchy,
AI is the rule of law
- Reid Hoffman
“
“

Opposing Paradigms
Crypto
• Decentralized
• Open
• Transparent
• Deterministic
AI
• Centralized
• (Mostly) Closed
• Black Box
• Probabilistic

GAFA Monopoly and Platform Dependency
“Over time, the best entrepreneurs,
developers, and investors have
become wary of building on top of
centralized platforms. We now have
decades of evidence that doing so
will end in disappointment. In
addition, users give up privacy,
control of their data, and become
vulnerable to security breaches.
These problems with centralized
platforms will likely become even
more pronounced in the future.”
– Chris Dixon

Blockchain as a foil against the pitfalls of AI
Two big ideas:
• Decentralized AI Marketplaces
• AI Networks & Decentralized
Autonomous Organizations
(DAO)

Also
(but for another day)
• Several ways AI can help improve blockchain
• More efficient mining (optimize energy consumption)
• Increase scalability (data sharding)
• Help with detection of fraudulent activity

Decentralized AI Marketplaces: The Concept
What if…
… every individual and business could provide their data completely
privately and securely in an open data exchange?
… AI models could compete with each other to provide the best results?
… everyone could be compensated fairly for participating in the above?
Wouldn’t we…
… end up with MORE data than is currently available to GAFA and other
centralized entities?
… also have NEW and BETTER data?
… and therefore better models, and better AI?
… but also more transparent AI

Decentralizing the Building Blocks of AI
(Lots of)
Data
Models
Computing
Power

Wait…
isn’t the blockchain bad infrastructure for AI?
Among other issues:
• Not scalable
• Heterogenous nodes  hard to
arrive at the same machine
learning outputs

Approach:
• Start with an enterprise-grade
distributed database
• Engineer-in blockchain
characteristics
BigchainDB:
Building a Scalable Blockchain Database

Ocean, Computable Labs:
Building Decentralized Data Protocols
• A tokenized service layer to
allow data to be shared and
sold in a secure manner
• Stores metadata (i.e. who owns
what), links to the data itself,
and more
• On top of the protocol, there
can be numerous data
marketplaces and exchanges,
all accessing the same data

Snips:
Decentralized Data Generation
• Sometimes the data does not
exist! (e.g. consumers have
never spoken to their coffee
machine before)
• Create “fake” user data by
generating thousands of
training examples
• Snips is creating a
decentralized network
incentivized by the upcoming
Snips AIR token

Gems, Effect:
Decentralized Mechanical Turk for Data Labeling
• Decentralized, interactive
marketplace for micro tasks
that require human
intelligence
• When workers compete a
task, they are paid with a
network token

Secure Computing
Goal:
Training models on data while keeping the data private

OpenMined:
Private Machine Learning
Protects data owners using:
• federated learning
• differential privacy
Protects model owners using:
• multi-party computation
• homomorphic encryption

Algorithmia:
Selling Models
• Developed a protocol for
crowdsourcing ML models
• Buyers supply data and offer
rewards to incentivize model
submissions
• Model validation takes place on a
public blockchain
• If model meets requirements,
payment is sent via smart contract

Numerai:
Creating Competition Among Models
• Building a stock market meta-model
through crowdsourcing
• Participants get data and in return
submit models
• Incentives are aligned through
staking and rewards
• Model validation is centralized but
payment takes place via smart
contract

DeepBrain Chain:
Decentralized Cloud Computing Platform
• Vision is to become “The AWS of AI”
• Help AI companies save up to 70%
of computing costs
• Leverages idle GPU / FPGA clusters
and individual computing units owned
by SMEs

Putting It All Together:
Decentralized Data Marketplaces
• Tokens & Crypto Economics to
solve the cold start problem and
incentivize participants
• Network effects:
“Multi-sided network effects from
users, data providers, and data
scientists make the system self-
reinforcing.”
— Fred Ehrsam
Via Fred Ehrsam, “Blockchain-based Machine Learning Marketplaces”

Next Big Idea:
Bots / AI networks
• Currently: lots of companies
building “AI for X”: Specialized
bots
• What happens when we have
many bots covering individual
tasks? Can they be combined for
more ambitious projects?
• Can this be done in an open
manner?

Fetch:
Autonomous Economic Agents
• AEAs = autonomous digital entities that
can transact independently of human
intervention and can work together to
construct solutions
• Open economic framework = “the
ultimate value exchange dating
agency”
• Smart ledger (scalable)
• Example use case: organize complex
trip (predict misconnections,
dynamically reroute trips, etc.)

SingularityNET:
“The Global AI Network”
• Decentralized marketplace for
transacting with AI agents
• AI agents could include neural net
tools, machine vision toolkits, etc.
• Uses staking and reputation to
optimize discovery of the best AI
agents
• AI agents can sub-contract tasks to
more specialized AI agents

Botchain:
Secure Identity System for Autonomous AI Agents
• Bot identity and validation
• Bot audit and compliance
• Control boundaries of
autonomy
• Shared marketplace for bot
add-ons

AI-Powered Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
What is an AI DAO?
A computational system that
runs autonomously on
decentralized infrastructure
Feedback loop continues by
itself, taking inputs, using
resources, producing
outputs
Example
A decentralized,
autonomous Uber
service of autonomous
vehicles

Only one issue with AI DAOs…
You wouldn’t be able to
turn them off… ever.

Conclusion
• Fascinating area
• Combining two individually challenging areas = major
levels of complexity
• All very early and experimental
• But a lot of infrastructure is being built
• Now is the time to think through the implications

AI & Blockchain: An Introduction

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