Interview with Cortex CTO Tian Jia — the Convergence of AI and Blockchain

In the recent virtual cryptocurrency conference, The B Word, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Square and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood discussed the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

There is no secret that AI and blockchain along with other innovative technology such as virtual reality, autonomous driving, and robotic are gaining traction from funds and investors. One such fund is ARK founded by Cathie Wood in 2014 with a focus on disruptive innovations — AI, robotics, energy storage, DNA sequencing, and blockchain technology.

Shark Tank investor and owner of Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban echoed Wood’s view on the power of AI and the potential of decentralized finance of blockchain (link).

The basic idea of blockchain is to remove the middle man in transactions, improve data transparency and privacy, and provide cheaper transaction costs. For AI services, blockchain returns data control to users and provides audit trails to AI models and results (link). The convergence of AI and blockchain is aligned with the EU General Data Protection Regulation that protects personal data and privacy. Combining AI and blockchain can solve the distrust issue towards enterprises leveraging AI.

Cortex CTO Tian Jia provides his take on decentralized AI and how Cortex plays a role in the convergence of AI and blockchain.

Interview Q&A

How can blockchain establish trust among users?

Blockchain employs irreversible hash functions to aggregate massive computing powers to create a forward progressing transaction graph. It’s pure technology. But over the years of its existence, the global user’s consensus has grown significantly, purely emotional and metaphorical. All these factors facilitated blockchain’s blossom over the past decade.

How can a business provide assurance to its users that its AI has not overstepped its bounds?

It’s an open question left to the whole AI community. What we do here in Cortex is that we make AI deterministic, therefore decodable, which will greatly help future inspection like in self-driving cars, or massive use cases in cameras and in finance. Upon car accidents, replaying the AI execution log is crucial to find who’s responsible. We may want it deterministic most under such circumstances.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in 2018, includes a right to obtain an explanation of decisions made by algorithms. How can blockchain explain AI results?

Blockchain records everything on-chain and, if using Cortex’s technology, any on-chain AI inference would be pinned down as deterministic execution branches. It may take decades to deal with the massive data generated, but I’m confident people will find ways to accelerate this analytic process, also using AI.

There are billions of IoT in today’s world collecting data and providing insights across many fields. In what way does IoT benefit from the convergence of AI and blockchain?

First of all, AI benefits from those IoT data a lot. Reversely, IoT can benefit from AI even more. Take the below examples:

• IoT manufacture. If we can control and record every process in IoT manufacturing, we can fine-tune it using AI technology, making it more efficient.
• IoT data. We can determine the timing order of IoT data using blockchain consensus. With AI-on-blockchain’s help, we can understand the data uploaded from IoT devices and directly giving orders automatically. And everything is recorded and audit-ready.

Where in the industry does Cortex Blockchain stand, when you heard Cathy wood mentioned the importance of the convergence of AI and blockchain?

As a serial entrepreneur, senior software engineer, investor, I believe blockchain is still seriously underrated. It should take a decent cut of the global finance industry, which is over 50% of all industries. AI is also a multi-trillion-dollar business. The impact that blockchain meets AI should be huge. After all, in Cortex, we believe where is data, where is AI. This motto drives us from the incarnation of 2018 to here we stand.