There is a growing worry of big Tech gaining so much power and control through their advanced AI programs. Especially with OpenAI becoming commercial and, well, closed AI for now, given the initial mandate its founders had in mind at inception, which was creating a coalition to check against a big Tech monopoly of AI. Fast forward a few years later, OpenAI partnered and took investment from the same tech giants it was meant to check.
AI research, development and product integration have since been led by few big and powerful technology companies. Stability AI also lost its way from its core initial goals and its founder had to step down earlier this year. The future of a decentralized, democratized AI looked more like a much distant dream of the past.
One of the trends since the coming of bitcoin and other decentralized currencies was also the forming of different communities around one cause, the future. The dream is to have a decentralized future not only for finance, but for governance, legal contracts and more, through blockchain technology. This technology’s potential applications have ushered dreams of a decentralized World, which has also created the perfect storm for decentralized AI and debates surrounding it.
The most important ingredient for decentralization is a driven community. Once there is a large community with the drive, the technology and the market will fall in place. As for technology, there are many federated learning and decentralized compute projects, even with the latency at run-time with distributed networks, there is a huge potential for such architecture and that improvements may be developed in the future with a community open source approach.
Projects io.net, Raven Protocol bring decentralized compute to users’ phones, and Theia AI that has users contributing images and knowledge to train the next wave of AI models have launched to help put ownership back in the users hands.
The issues surrounding decentralization are really complex and almost a virtually unknown territory as so much need to be put into consideration like disruption of big commerce, incomes of people and more. But as with any technology, when its time has arrived, the clever thing to do is to observe and learn to position ourselves for the future.
