DeepBrain Chain —The Secret to Kick Starting the AI Revolution
What is ‘DeepBrain Chain’?
DeepBrain Chain, is a revolutionary decentralised neural network, which aims to develop a low-cost and secure AI computing platform; powered by financially incentivised nodes (or miners) all round the world. In time, they are also plan on releasing a whole suite of AI related platforms. DeepBrain Chain will be looking to raise $9 million from their token sale (ICO), held on the 15th of December.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, are often regarded as concepts of the future, however with over 5,000 new AI based firms launched in the last 5 years alone, AI has slowly begun to infiltrate our lives. While AI may bring back memories of Arnie as ‘Terminator’ or HAL, conversely, AI is already saving lives through medical innovations.
Artificial Intelligence is defined as the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
We see this everyday in its most simplistic form, with products like Siri or Alexa; although far more advanced AI systems capable of self learning, such as Google’s ‘AlphaGo’, have begun to emerge. Interestingly though, of the $20 billion dollars spent on AI last year, between 20% and 30% was spent on building the required computational power. This is highlighted by the fact that Google’s AlphaGo requires around 600kW of energy, which would put the running costs at over $100 an hour and this is before you consider the highly impressive custom designed hardware. The requirement of enormous amounts of computational power is currently unachieveable for all but the largest players and is the primary barrier to mainstream adoption and greater proliferation of AI.
DeepBrain Chain
DeepBrain Chain however, provides a potential solution. It allows anyone to rent out their spare computational power and to be paid in DeepBrain Chain’s digital token (DBC). The idea is comparable to mining Bitcoin, although more akin to projects such as Golem. However DeepBrain Chain is so much more, as they also plan to release an:
- AI trading platform
- AI data exchange platform
- AI calculating trading platform
- AI model exchange platform
- AI container exchange platform
- AI application exchange platform
With the platform already developed, the two main barriers to adoption are; and
- Will it save companies money?
- Will people be willing to rent out their computational power?
In answer to the first question, DeepBrain Chain states in their White Paper that; “By utilizing DeepBrain Chain’s platform, artificial intelligence enterprises can reduce 70% of hardware cost”.
And in answer to whether people will be happy to rent out computational power, we only have to look so far as Ethereum mining (whom’s network has reached over 100,000 GH/s), to agree that if profitable, people are not only willing to rent out computational power, but to also design increasing efficient machines designed solely for mining. To put this in perspective, the Ethereum network has a hash power of 16,000x that which would be produced from AlphaGo’s 176 GPUs. Because of this, the tokenomics of the project will define its viability.
Road Map
The DeepBrain Chain project was started in May 2017, with the full platform release expected Q1 2018. You can find the full road map here.
Tokenomics
DBC total supply will be 10 billion, among which mining produces 50%. So far 600 million DBC have been sold through pre sale for $4.8 million, with a further 900 million to be sold through a crowdsale, with a hard cap of 10,000 ETH and 140,000 NEO (totaling around $9.7 million). This would put this initial market cap around $50 million (and $100 million once all DBC have been mined).
While this is a higher value ICO than I would normally invest in; as I think it would be unreasonable to expect a short term return of more than 400%. The fact the platform has been developed, the immediate (and growing) real world use case combined with the lack of any competition means I will definitely be investing in this project.
Market Potential
It is difficult to compare DeepBrain Chain to other crypto assets, as its value will be derived from its real world use case.
which is not even accounting for the uses of which we are yet to conceive of. If DeepBrain was able to capture even 1% of this, which in not unrealistic, it would have a revenue over $350 million a year.
The Team, Awards and Previous Clients
The CEO Feng developed the first Chinese voice assistant “Smart 360”, whose registered users exceeded 17 million, and has already led the DeepBrain Chain team to win an innovation and creativity award in 2017 ZhongGuancun Second Blockchain Competition. You can find information on all the team and their advisors’ here.
Conclusion
I believe that DeepBrain Chain is a hugely exciting project, not just for its potential financial return, but for its revolutionary effect it could have on an already revolutionary industry. The combination of the team, advisors, backers and clients should lead to a serious player, within the AI industry.
