
AI and Blockchain: An Introduction - hunglee2
http://mattturck.com/ai-blockchain/
======
eksemplar
I’m curious as to what incentive people would have to provide their data to a
public network. If they don’t, the premise of the article sort of falls apart.

I personally think that you’ll end up disappointed if you’re investing in
decentralization. I see blockchain being applied at companies like Maersk, but
it’s not really decentralized because it’s mainly operated by Maersk and the
only people they let on the nodes are their partners.

ML is it’s own thing, the thing about ML is that it’s not really new. We’ve
been doing manual data analytics since the birth of data, and all ML really
does is digitize the analytic department. Right now it’s too expensive, too
hard to utilize and requires data sets that are too huge for it to work, but
eventually, it’ll automate much of your analytics department, because one data
scientist will be able to do the work of x old school analysts, making it more
efficient in terms of money.

I think the reason only AI and Blockchain were ever put together was to sell
snake oil, because why on earth would you use a terrible database to run ML?
Even today we don’t run our analytics on live data, instead we construct
separate data warehouses on database structures build for analytics.

Good luck with your investments though, I personally put my “risky”
investments into a robotics company called Odico and tripled the value.

I think the truth about blockchain is that the fad is over. It’s been 9 years.
At one point I could buy coffee with bitcoin, today I can’t even turn my
remaining crypto into fiat.

~~~
leppr
> I’m curious as to what incentive people would have to provide their data to
> a public network.

When people talk about combining AI and Blockchain that's very often the exact
problem they think Blockchain can tackle: programmatic transfer of value, so
as to systematically compensate the data providers, in ways and quantities
that'd be inconvenient to deal with otherwise. I won't bother finding a buyer
for my car's windshield data if all that brings me is 50 cents a month. But if
data from all my various devices can get me 100 bucks a month, and the set up
and maintenance for the system is automated and trivial, I'm very likely to
take the free money.

The second aspect is that you don't need to provide your data to the whole
network, simply to those who compensate you. Not everything needs to be on the
blockchain.

Thirdly, efforts are made into developing techniques that allow users to
provide data for training, while keeping the identifying aspects, or even the
whole data, private, either with simple k-anonymization or techniques that
distribute the AI training part (Enigma does this iirc).

Don't get stuck on the "blockchain as a database" part. What people are
excited about is a whole field of cryptography and trustless decentralized
networks.

~~~
eksemplar
I get that, I just think the assumption that people are willing to sell their
privacy data for petty cash is flawed. It’s not like traditional advertising
haven’t tried similar approaches, and failed, largely because petty cash is a
terrible motivator for most people.

I guess you could argue that it’s different with crypto because your data is
safer, but facebook has a billion users, and the people who’ve been doing the
whole #deletefacebook thing, just signed up for Instagram instead. People
really don’t care.

Would you sell your data for $5 a month? Maybe $15? I wouldn’t, especially not
if it took time to setup and maintain, and I have a gmail account.

~~~
leppr
If I didn't have to worry about security, yes. So a system that sold my data
for me while keeping it private, I would use. Same deal with AI assistants or
Facebook-like social networks, I would use them if there was a way to check
that they don't leak data. I believe cryptography will open these advances to
huge untapped demographics.

~~~
eksemplar
You can already sell your data though, and almost nobody bothers to do so. I
don’t think it’s the privacy bit that’s stopping people, at least not at
large, I think it’s time. $5 is a drop in the ocean to me, I’d just never
bother giving you my data for that little, even if my data were safe.

The reason I willingly give my data to google by using gmail is that they give
me an easy to use cloud mail with decent spamfilters. Or in other words, they
are saving me time.

Maybe you could offer me something other than money? Like financial statistics
on how I use my money? Sure, but those apps are already here, and people are
willingly giving away their data without privacy in those.

So you see, it’s not that I don’t think you can’t convince people to give up
their data, I absolutely do think that you can, I just don’t think petty cash
and privacy are good motivators.

~~~
leppr
Maybe you have a bias because of your favorable financial situation (which is
normal in here). For most people in the world, a reliable $10/month to cover
their Netflix subscription or buy them a meal would be something they'd be
very happy about.

Also I think the reason you willingly give data to Google for Gmail is that
you don't have a choice. It's take-it-all, the spam filters and the data
mining, or leave it and use ProtonMail, no in-between.

~~~
gaius
_For most people in the world, a reliable $10 /month to cover their Netflix
subscription or buy them a meal would be something they'd be very happy
about._

Your personal data has a cash value _only_ because it can be used to influence
future purchasing decisions. It's a simple equation, $x worth of personal data
has a y% chance of generating sales worth >$x. It therefore stands to reason
that the market value of the personal data of a person who doesn't have as
much purchasing power will be less, and may not even cover the cost of
stealing and then processing it.

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kingkongjaffa
Why are we sticking these two concepts together, are they not two
fundamentally different things?

What is the synergy by talking about them together other than they are the
flavor of the month buzz words?

Good God people, the second or third slide in the article has "AI(ML,data
science, big data)"

All of which are literally just applied statistics.

~~~
Scarblac
Big data isn't just applied statistics, big data is just data.

~~~
gaius
... and often not especially big, just too big for Excel

------
ge0rg
This is a very interesting insight into how AI and blockchain are seen by VCs.
I agree with IoT and AI being the next big things, but I fail to see how the
blockchain fits into the picture.

The author linked the "blockchain is the worst possible database" idea, but
this is a consequence of the design requirements, so making a "better
performing" blockchain database won't solve the problem.

The ideas about a decentralized market for AI training data are interesting as
well, but we have a hard time securing our local databases. If followed
through, this will end up with malicious actors and buying up our personal
data from these markets in bulk, and to blackmail us.

Maybe the tech will be developed in the next decades, allowing a remote AI to
be trained on my data without exposing it to third parties, but I'm sceptical
about the technical feasibility, and this will require significant up-front
resources to get there.

~~~
atupis
There is some interesting work done with federated learning
[https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-
collabo...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-
collaborative.html)

------
nl
Ok, so 99.5% of the time anything about Blockchain and AI is going to be
nonsense. (Aside - this is an interesting application of Bayes law!)

One thing that wasn't, and was actual machine learning and was actual
blockchain was the Algorithmia competition[1]. It's pretty interesting how it
works, and wasn't an entirely stupid idea (faint praise I know, but most ideas
in both AI and blockchain are).

[1] [https://blog.algorithmia.com/trustless-machine-learning-
cont...](https://blog.algorithmia.com/trustless-machine-learning-contracts-
danku/)

------
abrichr
Slightly off-topic, but I was rather hoping for something on the distributed
training of neural networks via the blockchain: make the "work" in "proof-of-
work" involve backpropagation. Like SETI@home [1] but for training neural
networks.

Here's a StackExchange question about this:

[https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/86364/distributing-
ne...](https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/86364/distributing-neural-
network-training-world-wide-using-blockchain)

Which links to this startup:

[https://www.deepbrainchain.org/](https://www.deepbrainchain.org/)

A quick skim of their white paper [2] leaves me skeptical.

[1] [https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/](https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/)

[2]
[https://dlc0uvc36o5o6.cloudfront.net/assets/whitepapers/Deep...](https://dlc0uvc36o5o6.cloudfront.net/assets/whitepapers/DeepBrainChainWhitepaper_en.pdf)

------
Roritharr
I've been contemplating this idea for a few years now. If you have fully
digital currencies that are completely unregulated and can be used
programmatically, it seems obvious that the missing puzzle piece to a valuable
product is a standardized API economy that can transact via this currency. But
I've been talking about this up and down the Blockchain space but I'm still
waiting for a proper solution to this.

There is nothing I can put in front of my Rest API that it starts earning me
money, no marketplace to advertise that my API accepts WhateverCoin for the
calls..

Once that is done, you wouldn't even need AI mostly, it would be sufficient to
even just speed up the normal API economy.

~~~
lucd
[https://ost.com/](https://ost.com/) could of some interest to you... As it
will allow companies to create their own branded token and offer everything
needed to manage it through a REST API, a wallet... They are currently on
alpha phase III focusing on the wallet
[https://medium.com/ostdotcom/announcing-ost-kit-alpha-
phase-...](https://medium.com/ostdotcom/announcing-ost-kit-alpha-phase-iii-
embedded-wallet-lite-challenge-4a67ea214971)

------
ganzuul
Personalized AI agents seem promising. They could data-mine user choices and
make suggestions for new issues to vote on, along with predicted user vote. If
the mining is done before submission to the database the user has a chance to
review the implications of the vote before committing.

This could for example suggest research papers for scientists to read, and not
suffer from tunnel vision.

------
tramGG
People are always sleeping on the originators of the AI + Blockchain movement:
Synapse AI ([https://synapse.ai/](https://synapse.ai/)) -- they (along with
many others like Goog, Seti, MS, etc) even spoke at the Decentralized AI
Summit in Feb. ([https://decentralized-ai.com/](https://decentralized-
ai.com/))

This team even launched their own wallet application like two days ago.
They're killing it.

Check out the yellowpaper, it has some really good stuff in it:
[https://synapse.ai/yellowpaper](https://synapse.ai/yellowpaper)

------
masterbit
... blockchain as the coded constitution for a future AI world:
[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-
sym...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-symbolic-
discourse-and-the-ai-constitution/)

------
sandGorgon
is this numerai ? because basically they are pretty much using homomorphic
encryption to create AI-compatible data and store it on blockchain.

~~~
claytonjy
Their data isn't on the blockchain, is it? I think their ERC20 token (NMR) is
logically orthogonal to their homomorphically-encrypted data; they use NMR to
incentivize you to do what they want with those datasets, but there's no more
fundamental relation between the two.

------
gaius
Every time I think I’ve seen peak HN someone takes it to the next level

