Blockchain + Machine Learning: Democratizing Data Access

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Emerging trends combining blockchain and machine learning technologies, and a project, Synapse AI, working in this space

The Current Situation

Machine learning is the most recent area in which large companies, and even governments, have been competing. Having access to superior models over those of your competitors can provide great competitive advantages when using these models as either services or as back-end components to various applications. For example, with something like image recognition services, the market is effectively won by the company with the best performance. These models require little to no person-to-person contact to use, and are simple to hook into programmatically, so it would seem that there is little need for loyalty if a competitor’s product were more effective. Therefore, since performance is the key indicator of success in this arena, is it in the best interest of these entities to ensure that their competitors cannot match their performance.

One may assume that superior machine learning ability is a function of mathematical prowess. However, it is widely understood that this is not typically the case. Most technical progress in the field is publicly available and is presented at conferences open to everyone. Instead, advantages in the field of machine learning primarily come from having more, or better, data to train models with. A model can be extremely sophisticated, but if it is trained with low-quality data or not enough data, it will nonetheless be limited in its effectiveness. Conversely, a relatively simple model, given very high-quality data, can often outperform a more complex one that was trained with bad data. Therefore, the ones who will hold the power in the field of machine learning are the ones who have control over, and access to, large amounts of data. Coincidentally, the entities that tend to have the data, such as large tech companies, like Google or Facebook, also tend to have the best researchers and modelers available. They keep private, centralized data repositories that they collect from user data (much of which is voluntarily entered in by users), and can then use these large data-sets to train their cutting-edge models.

Thus enters the potential of blockchain technology in machine learning, primarily in the context of data ownership, collection, and access. If we were to decentralize data collection and allow everyone to access useful data-sets, the competitive moats that these large corporations have would be erased. Given that these data-sets are made from user-contributed activity logs and content, it is only fair that the data is made available to the users who effectively created them.

Synapse AI

This is what the Synapse AI project aims to accomplish with its platform. It is creating a platform in which data contributors are fully-aware of the data that they are contributing, and ensures that they are compensated for their contributions. For example, users will be able to knowingly contribute their social photos and their tags, or their GPS data, in exchange for compensation. Users of the platform can then pay to access these curated data-sets or trained models in the form of micro-services. The platform aims to create a cyclical economy in which: 1) agents contribute data, 2) data is pooled, 3) models are created using this data, and then 4) agents consume the models. The Synapse AI team hopes that this enables agents in the world to exponentially increase their capabilities by compounding their knowledge of the world through this cyclical process. You can think of this as a sort of automated active learning in which the agent itself autonomously queries for additional information or modeling capabilities. The tokens themselves are used for payments in the platform, for bonding to ensure quality is maintained, and for staking in order to support services.

If this all sounds interesting, you can get 50+ free tokens on the Synapse platform by simply making an account using my referral link (https://tokensale.synapse.ai/r/59860) and confirming your email. Once their ICO is over in March, you will be credited your tokens, which can be stored on any Ethereum wallet. If you want to be even more involved, consider buying some tokens in their ICO, and join the conversation on their various social media channels:

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