Investing in Flock
Flock is an end-to-end AI co-creation stack integrating decentralized federated learning onchain.
The crypto-incentivized platform seeks to democratize AI agent training, fine-tuning, and inferencing. It seeks to halt user data collection, preserve privacy, and encourage widespread governance participation. The result? Community-owned models built by many, not few, with data contributors and model builders being rewarded.
Here at Inception, we see Flock as not only a socially conscious initiative but also a lucrative venture.
The AI market is on a supercharged growth trajectory, with growth predicted at a compound annual growth rate of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030, from $165B to $1.5T. Revenues are already in the billions of dollars and expected to hit nearly $60B by 2027.
But the AI value chain is broken. The current market is dominated by highly centralized and closed-source companies, with geographical restrictions blocking billions of potential users and contributors. Companies like OpenAI are not open, and they are currently receiving the lion’s share of revenue generated by AI apps.
To address this issue, Flock.io is building a co-creation hub for new AI models and dapps tailored for specific needs, built by the community and for the community. Their platform empowers communities to collaboratively build, train, and deploy AI models in a privacy-preserving, secure, and incentivized way, democratizing AI development.
Data stays local by default for model developers and data contributors are rewarded for their service. Their aim is to decentralize the AI value chain to harness community effort to its maximal extent.
They are also building toward decentralized the entire machine learning (ML) stack. From data to compute to training to inference, Flock has decentralized solutions on its roadmap.
Data: Using federated learning to train on local and crowdsourced data, and smart contracts to reward data contributions in a more fair and democratic way.
Compute: Run compute on any environment (decentralized compute).
Training: Out-of-the-box training client that allows Flock users to train ML models more easily and quickly. Also, decentralized LLM fine-tuning and quality control, cryptoeconomically incentivized and secured.
Inference: Federated learning also enables decentralized model hosting, and smart contracts enable revenue-sharing with those model developers.
Flock has a growing ecosystem of partnerships from decentralized storage solutions (Filecoin/IPFS) to healthcare (UCL hospital and Beijing Tsinghua Changgeng Hospital) to web3 infrastructure providers (Request Network). We are confident that they will keep growing their ecosystem and integrations to realize their vision of an AI future that is much more democratic and open than today.
Jiahou, Flock’s founder and CEO, boasts extensive expertise in federated learning, combined with a visionary understanding of how blockchain and AI will be combined. He demonstrates great leadership, successfully bringing together an excellent team, notably comprising Oxford CS and math alumni and an engineering lead with a PhD in CS who previously founded Dola.ai (acquired by Tencent). We are confident that they will help build a future that improves user privacy safeguards in AI while optimizing the application of this protected data to develop proprietary AI solutions.
Welcome Flock!
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Disclaimer: This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice, or investment recommendations. This post reflects the current opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Inception Capital, its affiliates, or individuals associated with Inception Capital. The opinions reflected herein are subject to change without being updated.
