At their First Annual Yearly Summit on Tuesday, the artificial intelligence initiative AIDecentralized announced a partnership with SingularityNET — the platform behind the humanoid robot Sophia — to launch the Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA).
In creating the new industry alliance, the teams hope to “provide a medium for member organizations to coordinate regarding standards, protocols, interfaces and other technical matters,” and provide guidance and other resources to emerging AI blockchain projects. Essentially, the aim is to create a centralized, open source authority for AI blockchain initiatives.
In addition to serving as an industry group, DAIA also plans to operate as a fiscal and strategic resource for blockchain AI projects. This role will involve not only making development talent available à la the Apache Foundation, but directly investing in promising projects and advising others on AI blockchain investing. Initially, DAIA plans to support 100 projects over the next two years, with funding allowances of USD 2 million for each of the first 50 projects.
The announcement of DAIA marks the latest effort to join AI and blockchain technologies in a way that is not only cooperative, but controlled democratically. As with the AI Crypto team’s efforts to crowdsource training data instead of leaving it to large players to supply, DAIA intends to safeguard the development of AI by removing it from the control of powerful entities.
In a statement, Dr. Ben Goertzel, head of SingularityNET, said, “Today we face an AI oligopoly, where data and frameworks are largely owned by a handful of corporations. With DAIA, we aim to leverage blockchain and related technologies to create a democratically-governed AI community that will benefit the broader society, rather than a few powerful companies.”
To do that, the team is attempting to create as broad-based an ecosystem as possible by which AI can leverage blockchain.
The same goal led to the partnership in February between SingularityNET and quantum blockchain company Nexus. As reported in Blockchain News, that project sought to create a blockchain network that allowed AI robots to communicate and transact in a decentralized way—far from the prying and often conflicted reach of AI behemoths like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.
