Recently, a new hedge fund startup based in San Francisco unveiled the latest advances in its research, which links Artificial Intelligence, encryption, crowdsourcing and bitcoin.



Numerai has created a platform that encrypts and disguises - with a process similar to "homomorphic encryption" - commercial data. In this way, private data is shared among a company of scientists - mostly anonymous - with a view to using it to construct models of automatic learning that analyze that data and to discover better ways of trading financial assets without need to know what or to whom the mentioned data belong. And because an anonymous job needs an anonymous salary, the currency chosen to repay the developers was bitcoin.



The scientists who make the best predictions of data analysis or the most efficient models, are paid in bitcoins, making possible the anonymity not only of the details and owners of the data itself, but also of the scientists. On this, Richard Craib, founder of Numerai, says "To anyone who can give us predictions, if they work, we hit them in bitcoin." However, some of the data scientists have left anonymity to offer comments that praise the innovations that drives this company. Such is the case of Phillip Culliton of Buffalo, who has stated that "the distribution of funds in Numerai is made among the top 100 of competitors (developers), in large and fair amounts at the top of the leader board."



Numerai also allows the code or algorithms used by scientists to stay with them; That is, the company ignores the methods used by its developers for predictions and models; The recognition of their work derives from the efficiency of their products. This system of contribution of knowledge between several collaborators is known like Crowdsourcing.



The startup aims to, on the one hand, innovate in the field of artificial intelligence so that the machines can manage the activities of the company in a horizontal way, following one of the pillars of the philosophy on which the creator of bitcoin was based, it is decentralization; And on the other hand, seek to apply these systems to business and the financial world. It is in both cases that the initiative finds its reason. So the project also has the support of personalities such as Howard Morgan, the co-founder of Renaissance Technologies.



Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence dedicated to developing techniques that allow the creation of programs capable of generalizing behaviors based on information supplied, that is, predictions.

