According to a report by CoinDesk on July 23, venture capital giant a16z Crypto recently led a $15 million seed round of financing for the decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) data layer project Poseidon . Poseidon was incubated by Story, an intellectual property (IP) protocol, which is also one of a16z's portfolio companies and aims to transform intellectual property into programmable assets that can be authorized and managed on the blockchain through smart contracts.
Poseidon aims to provide traceable, actionable and monetizable training data for robots and AI models , according to an emailed announcement Tuesday .
“The most accessible training data is already being exhausted for AI-based models,” Chris Dixon, managing partner at a16z Crypto, said in an email.
“Poseidon’s decentralized data layer aims to establish a new economic foundation for the internet, rewarding creators and data providers who provide diverse inputs to the next generation of intelligent systems.”
AI models, especially generative AI, often rely on massive data sets for training - data that is often scraped from the internet, including copyrighted works such as books, art, music, and code. Some creators believe that this practice constitutes unauthorized use and copyright infringement because their works are used for commercial purposes without permission or compensation. This issue has sparked several lawsuits. For example, The New York Times took legal action because OpenAI used its news content to train a large model without permission.
As AI becomes more and more integrated into all aspects of people's lives, the collection, storage and use of data will attract much attention. The concepts of decentralization, data sovereignty and on-chain governance represented by blockchain and smart contracts are in line with this development trend.
Decentralized technology helps achieve secure and controllable data sharing, enabling multiple parties to jointly participate in the training of large models without leaking privacy or proprietary information. Data sharers ( creators ) have the opportunity to use their works for AI training and get paid, thus opening up new possibilities for data monetization .
RWA process in AI
PowerVerse regards data contribution for AI big models and the benefits it generates as the development path of RWA in the AI field, that is, putting valuable data on the chain and generating benefits. Data contributors not only participate in the training of AI big models, but also contribute their own data value by providing effective information, which is another kind of labor contribution. For example, in the field of autonomous driving, users collect the latest street conditions and provide them to vehicles so that they can make more correct judgments. This is the value provided by the latest road condition data.
Therefore, when the AI economy or MachineFi becomes a social phenomenon, the AI economy will decide whether to provide incentives based on whether users provide data support, forming an economic model in which the AI economy empowers human users.
At present, the industry's focus on the RWA field is more limited to the process of putting physical assets on the chain - tokenizing information such as real estate, securities, and stocks, which brings benefits due to its liquidity and flexibility. However, in the huge AI market, data is as indispensable to AI as oil is to the industrialization process, and data will also choose to be put on the chain to play its greater value.
DePIN infrastructure layout
RWA is one part, but the ability to form infrastructure to provide AI to form a market requires the decentralized infrastructure network (DePIN), which includes the RWA process and provides a wider range of underlying infrastructure support.
Take the general computing of AI large models as an example. When AI becomes a part of daily life, the frequent operation and computing of large models is a phenomenon that permeates every corner of life. From daily information exchange with AI, choosing the lowest-priced taxi, shopping with the highest cost-effectiveness, to banks using AI to analyze financial models, rendering immersive scenes in the metaverse, etc., all rely on real-time computing of AI. Data providing information to AI is one aspect, and how to make AI with massive data run is another.
Decentralized cloud computing integrates high-quality computing performance such as intelligent computing and edge computing, and combines blockchain, smart contracts, token economy, DeCloud (decentralized storage), and privacy technology to form an AI-supported DePIN. In this process, the decentralization, privacy, and security of the AI data layer are guaranteed, while the computing performance is not inferior to traditional centralized cloud computing, and a DAO-governed on-chain economy is formed. At present, PowerVerse is widely deploying computing nodes to form a distributed computing network and access users' idle computing resources, forming a free computing trading market by putting computing power on the chain.
When AI arrives and forms an AI economy, the AI economy is decentralized to empower user contributors. This is what is happening.
