With blockchain spreading into niches all around the globe, each sector in our economy seems to be taking a step back and examining what innovations this technology could bring. Whether it’s globally decentralized healthcare, Smart Contracts or even Decentralized Applications (DApps), an increasing number of technological communities are quickly drawing away from the old and embracing the new.
Not the least of these, the Artificial Intelligence community is already turning a keen eye to blockchain. AI experts across the board are coming to realize that this new technology could provide significant benefits for their own community and, with growing interest, are already beginning to apply blockchain with high expectations. Let’s take a peek into some of the ways these experts believe blockchain could give significant infrastructural benefits.
Blockchain may be helping to solve the training side of AI. Nearly every AI application requires huge datasets to train on. This includes the classification of real-world parameters based upon in-sample data. As a result, the generation, storage, and processing of these huge datasets is one of the most critical steps in the AI field.
A number of new blockchain based startups are working to streamline this process. Lampix is working to build the first image mining network. It has embarked on the process of storing one of the largest online image datasets. Whereas other startups generate a proprietary set which is only available to subscribers, Lampix’ dataset is open source and available to the entire community via blockchain.
Another company, Shardix, provides a blockchain based database solution. Conventional blockchain technology is hampered by scaling problems wherein all data must be replicated across all nodes in the ecosystem. This problem is particularly acute when the datasets for training AI are stored in database form. Shardix obviates this by sharding and replicating the data among various nodes. This provides a way to store large datasets via the blockchain efficiently.
Datum, another startup, is forming an online data marketplace to directly buy, sell, and create datasets. These sets can be user-generated both by corporate clients as well as individual users. The marketplace provides plugins that allows AI to be trained directly from these datasets.
Experts through the AI community have taken interest in using blockchain for a hyperledger storage foundation of data lakes. Though it hasn’t yet been publicly applied, the interest professionals are showing is a telling sign for future projects.
In addition, an AI audit log has proved a potentially key application for blockchain in AI. There is much difficulty in the world of artificial intelligence when it comes to issues like discovery, tracking and compliance. A project called Botchain may be on its way to sorting out these problems. From a birds-eye-view, it’s requiring the AI components to record their activity to a blockchain system.
These are only a few of the many ways that the AI community is considering for new blockchain application. With such a rapidly spreading technology, it really is no wonder that AI experts are beginning to adopt the blockchain system. Only time will tell how far blockchain will spread into Artificial Intelligence.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and should not be construed as those of the publication. Richard Nehrboss is a principal at Shardix and any references herein are not intended to be promotional in nature.
