20.03.2024
The intersection of AI and crypto demonstrates how blockchain-based solutions can enhance AI capabilities while simultaneously creating innovation opportunities and use cases within the crypto ecosystems, potentially boosting adoption.
In light of the annual NVIDIA GTC (GPU Technology Conference), which kicked off March 18th with a spotlight on Artificial Intelligence, the event has unveiled new products and technological advancements that will be under a broader audience's attention but also caught the crypto community's interest from the beginning. Beyond the traditional significance of GPUs for mining, the presence of key figures like Jules Urbach (founder of Render Network) and Illia Polosukhin (co-founder of NEAR Protocol) suggests potential collaborations and innovations in the realm of decentralized AI and blockchain integration.
NVIDIA and GTC background.
NVIDIA GTC is a global event that attracts developers, researchers, industry leaders, and tech enthusiasts interested in NVIDIA's latest advancements and product developments in artificial intelligence (AI), accelerated computing, data science, graphics, autonomous technologies, and more. With a market capitalization of over $2 trillion, NVIDIA revealed the state of the highly anticipated B100 Blackwell GPU, announced as one of the most powerful GPUs available. It is not just a chip but a new platform for deploying AI features. The event showcased the company's latest innovations and featured talks, sessions, hands-on training workshops, and demos.
AI Spotlight Draws Crypto Interest.
The crypto community's attention has been captured by the participation of Jules Urbach from Render Network and Illia Polosukhin from NEAR Protocol. This has been widely interpreted as a pivotal moment for the crypto industry, but it is crucial to grasp the significance of their role in the realm of Artificial Intelligence.
Of note, Jules Urbach of Render Network is not a newcomer to GTC. Already back in 2013 Jules presented the first cloud GPU rendering pipeline. Notably, he described the potential of GPU raytracing architectures to provide significant speed increases over CPU rendering. This year's conference, titled "The Future of Rendering: Real-Time Ray Tracing, AI, Holographic Displays, and the Blockchain," (follow the link to watch after 3 PM PDT) will be the platform for him to unveil his vision for the future of GPU- and AI-driven rendering. In contrast, Illia Polosukhin, co-founder and CEO of NEAR Protocol, and formerly a Google AI developer, will participate in the "Transforming AI" panel discussion (this panel just finished, watch it via the link) alongside the creators of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper from 2017. This paper introduces a groundbreaking neural network architecture, the “Transformer model,” explicitly designed for sequence-to-sequence tasks. The model has profoundly impacted various domains of AI, particularly deep learning. Its unique architecture incorporates a mechanism that selectively focuses on the most critical data within an input, akin to directing attention to specific elements rather than others.
Render Network and NEAR Protocol: two different crypto AI approaches.
Render Network is a decentralized GPU rendering platform that offers on-demand access to high-performance nodes worldwide. It creates a marketplace, ensuring transparency, security, and efficient payments using its native token, RNDR. Render Network aims to address the limitations of traditional cloud rendering services. Providing scalable and cost-effective rendering solutions empowers a range of industries, such as 3D animation, architecture, scientific simulation, and AI training. The Render network complies with the ERC-20 token standard, aligned with the Ethereum blockchain. Notably, RNDR migrated to Solana to reduce the token supply, adhering to a 4:1 ratio, and this migration introduced additional functionality facilitated by smart contracts. In other words, RNDR is a utility token that facilitates the connection between users to share wasted GPU power to render 3D visual effects. The Render blockchain becomes a platform to provide and share computational power and gives the user an opportunity to monetize their compute power by offering to other users. While the initial focus on 3D animation is likely to only gain relevance, its applicability towards providing their computation for those training machine learning models is worth taking seriously, especially in a world where access to AI is likely to be democratized.
What we know now as the NEAR Protocol initially had nothing to do with blockchain or cryptocurrencies. Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov founded NEAR.AI, a start-up completely focused on AI. Later, they created a blockchain for internal needs to process payments to their associates. NEAR Protocol is a chain abstraction stack, a web platform designed to be transparent and resilient, allowing builders to create apps that scale across blockchains for billions of users. With NEAR, its native cryptocurrency, developers can develop applications without choosing between platforms, finding the right tools, or learning new programming languages. Use cases for NEAR are hosting applications with zero setups, fewer costs, and reduced headaches, developing a new, more open digital economy, and creating Web3 applications. NEAR leverages the “Nightshade consensus protocol,” a proof-of-stake blockchain mechanism: This protocol enables NEAR to process approximately 100,000 transactions per second and generate a block every second, showcasing its impressive transaction processing capabilities. In recent times NEAR has pivoted back to AI, and their AI+ blockchain solutions under development are crowdsourced data labeling, governance solutions to manage and monitor AI transparently and proactively, content management systems, and the establishment of on-chain reputation.
AI and crypto, a path for adoption.
The encounter between AI and crypto enables a natural synergy that impacts both dimensions. Most of all, AI opens the path for blockchain use cases and potential adoption. Several practical applications of the AI and crypto combination include:
Fraud Detection: AI-driven systems analyze blockchain transactions to identify suspicious patterns, preventing fraud and protecting users' assets.
Smart Contract Auditing: AI's ability to identify vulnerabilities in smart contracts before exploitation enhances the security of decentralized applications (dApps).
Deepfake uncovering and content validation: crypto can transform content validation by creating transparent, trustworthy systems that make it easy for any creator to tag any media they put out on the blockchain, offering a surefire way of distinguishing it from deepfakes.
Crowdsourcing Compute: crypto can act as a marketplace for sharing computing capabilities through a blockchain that connects users who contribute unused GPU power to end-users, enabling efficient utilization of computing resources.
AI cryptocurrencies had the second-best performance from October 2023 to January 2024. They have demonstrated remarkable growth, showcasing the synergy between artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
Source: Cointelegraph The combination of AI and blockchain technology promises to transform the cryptocurrency landscape, offering innovative solutions and improved investment opportunities. Will this promise be kept?
AI-related buzzwords certainly carry weight in the current market, and crypto is known to take advantage of any hype. Understandably, analysts such as Coinbase's David Hen view the current performance of such tokens as overblown and their value creation in the AI space mired in challenges.
So let's remember that hype is not exclusive to memes, but that well-founded use cases can benefit from market enthusiasm as well. One way of doing our own research on two of the most exciting projects in the space is by following the NVIDIA conference, with a focus on the presentations linked above.