New Alliance Aims to Decentralize AI With Blockchain

Artificial intelligence and blockchain technology seem to be two of the buzziest tech-related topics out there, and a newly announced group promises to bring those two types of tech under a single umbrella.

The Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA), announced this week, aims to foster work in artificial intelligence that relies on the blockchain for distribution—with the benefit being that it would increase interoperability and transparency and push the technology away from being controlled by just a handful of companies.

The two main partners in the alliance—the online marketplace SingularityNET, which is best known for giving the AI robot Sophia  (opens in a new tab) her brain, and AI Decentralized, a global initiative of the Association for Computing Machinery—announced the collaboration at the first AI Decentralized Yearly Summit, which took place in Toronto on Tuesday.

The two organizations hope to share their knowledge in the new group, with the goal of finding new approaches to machine learning, collaborative filtering, and reputation management, among other topics.

According to Crowdfund Insider, SingularityNET  (opens in a new tab) CEO Ben Goertzel emphasized that the company wants to build an ecosystem around AI technology that isn’t tethered to massive organizational bodies. The group is an answer of sorts to the Partnership on AI, which brought a number of tech companies and other organizational bodies together starting in 2016. Some of the firms involved in the partnership, including Facebook and Google, have since faced data scandals—scandals that DAIA hopes to avoid, said Goertzel.

“To me, DAIA is more than just another industry organization,” Goertzel explained in comments reported by Crowdfund Insider  (opens in a new tab). “It’s a movement—a movement by a network of adventurous technologists and entrepreneurs around the globe, aimed at wresting control of the world’s AI and the data and computing power that feeds it from the handful of big tech companies and big governments that are currently threatening dominance.”

This point was echoed by Toufi Saliba, the cofounder of AI Decentralized  (opens in a new tab).

“This responsibility is about knowing that the AI we create today, and that will impact the world for the next 1,000 years and beyond, may be oppressive, or it may be liberating,” Saliba said, according to VentureBeat  (opens in a new tab). “This is why we are creating mechanisms that will financially incentivize people to create AI that will be liberating and act for the greater good.”

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