Tech Companies Capitalising on AI and Blockchain
By Oliver Freeman
A decade ago, blockchain took the world by storm — a hyperbole filled craze which, for many people, seemed like a temporary novelty with its promise of a distributed, decentralised public ledger that would challenge and overcome traditional systems and institutions.
Yet, much like the story of David and Goliath, blockchain stands strong and has garnered the backing of a myriad of followers in an attempt to fight institutional giants of this world. Through this struggle, many successes have been achieved and numerous developments made, ranging from the development of applications, security systems, currencies, and new payment systems, just to name a few.
A more recent trend, however, is the creation of blockchain-based decentralised applications (dApps) combined with the power of artificial intelligence (AI), allowing for autonomy and independence from governing corporations, moving us one step closer to the elimination of many monopolies.
Blockchain and AI: A powerful pairing
Across the tech ecosystem, the use of AI is becoming more prevalent to, among other things, collect data and build behavioural algorithms. To stay competitive, companies across the spectrum are adapting and incorporating this new technology into their products and services — which comes with challenges of its own.
Many crypto startups are pushing to create a new form of data marketplace which democratises access to AI data and allows these visionaries to share their data with projects and people that need it. Due to the fact that these marketplaces are powered by blockchain technology, there is no handling of files other than between the providers and users, keeping sensitive data from the prying eyes of reigning tech giants.
Here are a few blockchain-developed companies that have successfully implemented AI into their services, and have made their foray into eradicating the monopolisation of data.
Neureal.net
Founded by Wil Bown in 2014, a prolific crypto miner and winner of the Million Dollar Texas Bitcoin Hackathon, The Neureal Foundation’s aim is to grow the world’s largest decentralised repository of predictive intelligence. Their software, Neureal, is an open-source, peer-to-peer AI supercomputer.
As seen in the Neureal White Paper, The Neureal Foundation used a staggered, four-stage funding process and has spent the undisclosed final sum to produce the first software of its kind. The software utilises decentralised protocol technology to produce distributed AI architecture, providing an infinitely scalable live data stream prediction, powered by blockchain tech.
Neureal gives individuals and SMEs access to an AI component that they wouldn’t usually be able to leverage. Their goal is to allow anyone to be right about anything, forever — which would remove the necessity of handling data of any size, and eliminates the cost burden of supercomputing.
The system is built in a modular fashion, so that components can be chopped and changed whenever necessary, to fit with any industry. Its prospects are endless: Neureal’s architecture is capable of predicting a heart attack accurately enough to save a life and can predict a hurricane accurately enough to warn people of the danger. It can even predict traffic and human patterns so sufficiently that companies like Lyft and Uber can adjust their routes and navigations to suit.
There’s still a long way to go for this startup, but as the foundation says, “Neureal gives humans the power to become limitless by predicting the future of anything.”
Dopamine.ai
In an age where data is becoming the fuel of the global economy, Goliaths such as Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft have monopolised the data market into a proprietary asset that drives their own profits. Centralised ownership of data is, clearly, becoming a problem. Founded by Uri Yerushalmi in 2017 and funded through a series of ICOs, Dopamine.ai believes that the monopolisation of data stifles data monetisation potential — meaning that when an entity controls all the data, others are unable to make money from the buying, selling or trading of said commodity.
According to Dopamine’s whitepaper, they found that data monetisation will become one of the primary sources of revenue in an economy that will create 180 zettabytes of data — 180 trillion gigabytes, to put it into perspective — by 2025. That’s if the data market becomes more democratic and tech giants stop monopolising the marketplace for the data they hoard.
In an attempt to force this change, the Dopamine network intends to be a disruptive solution to the current data and AI monopoly. Dopamine provides a decentralised marketplace on the blockchain platform for data providers, processors, and end users, that features frictionless micropayments for exchanging data by removing the middleman and all associated fees and third-party interference. They raise barriers which allow smaller tech companies to enter the data and AI industry.
Numerai
Numerai was founded in late 2015 by Richard Craib. Using his connections in the economic sphere, Craib crowdsourced the platform with backing from Peter Diamandis, Renaissance Technologies co-founder Howard Morgan, and Union Square Ventures. As it stands, Numerai believes that the stock market predictions are inefficient when it comes to machine learning (ML), as only a fraction of the world’s data scientists has access to its data.
Numerai proposes a new system for data scientists to communicate their beliefs about the quality of the current stock market prediction system. This system comes in the form of a decentralised hedge fund where thousands of data scientists from across the globe pool their intelligence together on the Numerai platform. On the platform, data scientists are constantly working on AI and blockchain problems. Given that there are so many contributors, there are often myriads of solutions to one problem which Numerai combines into a metamodel. This metamodel is classed as invisible super intelligence and is used to produce the most accurate possible predictions for the stock market movement.
In the spirit of keeping things interesting and accountable, whenever a scientist proposes a new model to Numerai, they must back it with a portion of their NMR (Numerai crypto) token. If their proposed model is approved and chosen, his/her stake will be doubled or tripled in return. Numerai also runs a competition whereby scientists create models based on raw data on ML problems which Numerai provides, rewarding them with Numeraire (NMR) cryptographic token. This system pushes scientists to do their very best work — proven by the fact that they have earned over $7 million USD in NMR tokens to date.
A Wider Perspective
The Numerai platform concept has a larger appeal if one can take a giant step back from the forest. In a similar vein, engineers at Revain are diligently working towards the creation of such a community-based platform where like-minded enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, techies, and general consumers alike can gather to exchange ideas, perspectives, and experiences, all on their blockchain-based system, providing transparent and unbiased reviews that are completely immutable. When a community develops around a central theme or goal, sharing knowledge, opinions, insider experiences, and recommendations, all sorts of great things are bound to materialise. If two minds are better than one, how awesome would be 100 or 1,000? While there is a way to go before The Platform will be ready for prime-time community collaboration, the engineers are working out the code as we speak. Watch this space for updates on Revain’s progress.
From these innovative projects, it’s clear that the marriage of blockchain and AI is reproducing companies that already demonstrate vast potential, and who are swiftly revolutionising traditional systems across the spectrum. The changes in tech are fast-paced, often ground-breaking, and will contribute remarkable findings and knowledge to our world and the businesses that span across it.
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