A recent OpenAI report showed that “the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time”, this is a 300.000x increase since 2012.

OpenAI Report: AI and Compute

The immediate consequences from this are:

Higher costs , as used compute is increasing faster than supply

, as used compute is increasing faster than supply Longer lead times for new solution , as model training takes longer

, as model training takes longer Increased market entry barriers based on access to funding & resources

These consequences can proof dire for smaller firms and researchers, limiting their ability to create competitive models without significant funding. And even with funding, they might be blacklisted from resources if they’re considered competition by the providers.

“So Gavin Belson can just pick up his phone and make us radioactive to every single web hosting service?”

But big corporations will feel the costs as well considering both the growth rate of resources and the growth rate of their AI efforts multiplied. I spoke to a few Chief Data Officers of Fortune 500 firms over the past months, and while they don’t consider it an issue yet, even they have to agree that they can invest their money in better ways than in bought-in HPC resources.

The beauty of blockchain ecosystems is that they allow to tap into otherwise unused resources, trade resources that would not have been tradable, and allow people to participate in a market that otherwise could not participate. From an economic perspective, it improves the leverage on existing resources.

Where 1st & 2nd generation data blockchain solutions used this to lower the barrier for access to annotated quality data, Raven Protocol is going to solve the training cost challenge. It is closing the gap that would have prevented the proverbial chain to hold, that is only as strong as its weakest link (hint: it’s the data value chain).

Together, the solutions in this blockchain data ecosystem create new opportunity and they lower cost. Especially the second is key as it lowers the entry barriers for new innovation, enabling more people to contribute and therefore potentially accelerating our progress as a society.