AI & Blockchains — Projecting the Potential of AI-Enabled dApps
Beyond the hype around blockchains as the medium for “world computers,” you will find a blossoming narrative covering the synergy of blockchains and AI. Two of the most popular yet esoteric developments in the technology arena today, their symbiotic relationship is often viewed with doubts and skepticism.
Even so, a class of startups has emerged at the convergence of blockchains and AI, hoping to amplify the advantages of both technologies in the process.
“One of the primary things that hinder the convergence of AI and blockchains is the perceived lack of real use cases,” says Ziqi Chen, CEO of AI and blockchain startup CortexLabs. “Blockchain is challenging to understand without a CS background. AI is another difficult field to explore even with a CS background. because it is a completely new programming paradigm. Combine the two, and you’re entering unexplored territory.”
That untouched realm is daunting but also sheds light on the vast potential of coalescing novel advances born in the age of the Internet.
The Promise of Blockchains & AI
To understand the benefits of combining two pioneering technologies, it’s best to first understand the primary value propositions of each.
Blockchains are optimal mediums for intermediating trust, whereby a censorship-resistant public network, outside the purview of central control, can come to a consensus on the state of data transacted across the network — whether that be financial, social, gaming, or other data. For a small cost, blockchains append data into an immutable ledger, representing transparent accountability and a significant reduction in transaction costs via the removal of intermediaries.
AI is the more abstract concept of augmenting both the cognitive capacity of humans and computers. Machine learning, the most promising branch of AI, couples the computational capacity of a computer with an ability to execute tasks without being explicitly programmed to do so, such as in cases of autonomous driving where it is infeasible to enumerate all the scenarios due to their sheer number. As opposed to traditional static rule-based programs, machine learning programs are those that improve their performance of a specific task with experience during training. Rather than telling the computer what to do, one shows the computer what to do and lets it extrapolate and generalize to new situations based on statistical learning.
Together, blockchains and AI are symbiotic and can help each other overcome some of their explicit limitations.
For example, AI programs are computationally expensive, which precluded their operation on blockchains previously, but recent advances by Cortex Labs have enabled the ability to run AI on blockchains. Blockchain’s properties are fully leveraged to execute AI programs in a decentralized, immutable and transparent fashion.
The ability of AI to positively impact blockchains also extends to other areas. As another example, blockchains can provide low-cost, accessible mediums for marketplaces of ML tools, resources, and models (i.e., algorithms). By removing intermediaries and incorporating native incentive elements (e.g., tokens), global blockchain platforms can drive liquidity of data marketplaces without restrictions of central oversight, and increase M2M interactions at lower communication costs.
However, for Cortex Labs, the ultimate goal rests with enabling true smart contracts enhanced by AI and fostering an open model of AI collaboration on the blockchain.
AI Smart Contracts
Currently, public blockchains like Ethereum cannot realistically execute non-trivial AI models, which begs the discussion around the importance of forward-thinking platforms — can we imagine decentralized Netflix without personalized movie recommendations, decentralized Google without NLP models to filter search results, decentralized Uber without dynamically optimized routing?
At Cortex Labs, in particular, the goal is to not only embed AI functionality into smart contracts but also create incentive mechanisms that drive developers to share their AI models with the world on the blockchain. “There are currently a number of AI on blockchain projects, which are conceptualized in a basic fashion and present concrete, practical solutions,” details the CortexLabs whitepaper.
Those efforts mostly center on blending reinforcement learning with distributed mining, actualizing networks for the exchange and publishing of AI/ML data, and the deployment of homomorphic encryption for privacy. Cortex Labs, however, takes a decidedly different approach.
“[Cortex] facilitates all nodes working together to reach a consensus on the implementation of a smart contract that requires AI to empower the system with intelligent responses,” details the whitepaper. “As a stand-alone public chain compatible with EVM smart contracts, Cortex runs both existing contracts and inferred contracts with AI and will survive as a smarter web presence after the Genesis Block is released.”
At a high level, what Cortex is attempting is instilling AI functionality directly into smart contracts, a marked step ahead of the current suite of traditional smart contracts available on public blockchains. The result of AI-enabled smart contracts (and by extension, dApps) is a multitude of applications not currently feasible on blockchains, such as decentralized lending apps, anti-fake AIs, AI-enhanced CryptoKitties and more — all within the censorship-resistant and decentralized medium of a blockchain.
“From a machine learning researcher’s point of view, the Cortex platform brings together open models of a variety of basic smart applications with state-of-the-art quality, which will greatly accelerate their research and drive AI adoptions much faster,” details Cortex.
With the fusion of blockchains and AI-embedded smart contracts, the hotbeds of AI innovation can be supplemented by the social scalability of a publicly distributed network. And that’s a compelling proposition.
Technology has historically evolved in theaters of context, but the synergy of blockchains and AI offers a fluorescence into the uncharted territory of technological progress, unlocking the mysteries we perpetually contemplate.
