How NuNet Will Decentralize Artificial Intelligence
Greetings NuNetopians,
There has been a great deal of excitement surrounding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent months. With the release of DALLE2 and ChatGPT by OpenAI, there have been discussions about how they could revolutionize the creation of art and writing, along with fears that humans could be removed from the equation entirely, if AI proves to be better at content creation than us.
In this article, we will discuss another issue that is not being discussed as often in regards to this topic: the danger that these new AI tools could be controlled by centralized entities and access restricted in order to profit or gain user data. Then we will examine how NuNet’s framework of decentralized computing power can help ensure open access to AI tools in the future.
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
In early 2022, DALLE2 was first announced. Early example pictures showed that it could create highly stylized, artistic images with only a few simple prompts. Later, in September of that year, the general public was given access to the new AI tool. Countless images have been generated with the application since then.
Unsurprisingly, fears that this could eliminate jobs in the art and creative design industry have arisen, along with concerns that DALLE2 and other image generation algorithms like it are essentially plagiarizing existing artists by using their art as training data without their permission. There is a great deal of debate surrounding this issue, with some arguing that the AI is simply taking “inspiration” from other works, as all artists do, while others posit that the AI is actually copying from many works and combining the images to make them appear to be something new.
In this same vein, ChatGPT recently released to a record-breaking public response, gaining one million users in under a week. The AI proved capable of generating large amounts of unique text with only a short question or prompt. It has been used to generate poetry, prose, essays and even programming code.
Likewise, ChatGPT has stirred up a proportional level of controversy. Apart from the expected issue that it will put writers out of work, there is also a great deal of concern that it could disrupt education by allowing students to effortlessly create essays without actually learning how to write effectively.
While the debate over the efficacy and potential harm to society these AI algorithms pose will continue, it is undeniable that they are incredibly useful tools. Another great concern, then, is the question of who will be in control of these tools and how they will restrict access to them in order to profit.
The Centralizing Nature Of AI Computing
Training and running complex AI algorithms is not cheap. Some estimates show it costs $100,000 per day, or $3,000,000 per month to run ChatGPT, and that a single query to the system takes 8 GPUs to generate a response. People may have free access to these tools currently, but this will undoubtedly not remain the case forever.
Microsoft, which now owns the OpenAI project, plans to invest $10 billion more into ChatGPT. The tech giant will definitely expect a return on this investment, and it isn’t hard to imagine ways they will find to collect. Plans are already underway to integrate ChatGPT into the Microsoft search engine Bing, along with their suite of Office applications. It is obvious that they plan to overtake their rival, Google, which has long held a monopoly over internet search engine users.
Regardless of the outcome, on this current trajectory, big tech will remain in control, and even to a greater extent. Whichever tech giant controls the most powerful algorithms will have access to our data, to serve us targeted ads and steer our searches toward their preferred websites and apps. Access and control over AI is quickly becoming a measurement of power in our society, and that power is growing ever-more centralized into the hands of a small number of individuals.
However, this dystopian future is not set in stone. The algorithms used to create these AI applications can be easily shared through open source software. The bigger issue is running them on enough hardware and accessing large amounts of training data. Big tech has also gained a monopoly over cloud computing hardware with server silos, but NuNet offers an alternative solution to this dilemma.
NuNet Can Decentralize AI Computing
As stated before, open source versions of algorithms like DALLE2 and ChatGPT are readily available, but the problem is the amount of hardware needed for the computing power. Traditionally, the answer has been to build large server farms in a single location, necessitating the need for big tech corporations, who end up monopolizing control of the AI applications. NuNet presents a solution to this.
NuNet is a global, decentralized network that allows anyone to provide their device’s computing power for tasks such as machine learning. NuNet has focused on this use case through our GPU ML Cloud proposal, which won funding through Cardano’s Fund 8 Catalyst round. Since then, the GPU use case has been nearly fully developed, and is about to undergo testing with the community on our Discord server.
There have already been discussions within the team to one day run an open-source version of a ChatGPT-like algorithm on NuNet’s GPU infrastructure. This could be done through a third-party interested in using the NuNet platform, or our partner project SingularityNET. SNET has been fully focused on decentralizing AI since it was founded in 2017, and incubated NuNet for this very purpose of ensuring the hardware side of AI was also decentralized. The chat application would benefit from the readily available GPU power sourced from the NuNet community, potentially cheaper computational prices, and lack of centralized control from a big tech corporation.
Capturing The Value Of AI For Individuals
From the perspective of compute providers, NuNet allows individuals to gain some of the monetary value of AI. Instead of all the cost of running AI algorithms going to big tech cloud providers, it will be distributed to individuals who provide ML processing with their devices. Value is exchanged via the NTX token between those running the applications and those providing compute power on NuNet.
NuNet has the potential to become the lifeblood of the AI revolution, and ensure its power and value remain in the hands of individuals. We hope you will join us in our journey.
NuNet Is Hiring!
NuNet currently has a number of open positions for various roles within the team. If you have the skills and desire to join us in our journey, you can find more information and contact us through our career page.
About NuNet
NuNet lets anyone share and monetize their computing resources, turning cloud computing power from a centralized service into an open protocol powered by blockchain. Find out more via:
