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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

Which links to this startup:

https://www.deepbrainchain.org/

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

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

[2] https://dlc0uvc36o5o6.cloudfront.net/assets/whitepapers/Deep...

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.

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.

People are always sleeping on the originators of the AI + Blockchain movement: 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/)

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

... blockchain as the coded constitution for a future AI world: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-sym...

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

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