Crypto-based AI markets, and AI financial analysis – Cointelegraph Magazine

We’re rolling out genuine use cases for AI and crypto each day this week — including reasons why you shouldn’t necessarily believe the hype. Today get two for the price of one: Blockchain based AI marketplaces, and financial analysis.

It may not seem like the most exciting use case blending AI and crypto, but both Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer cite blockchain-based marketplaces that source data and compute for AI as their top pick.

AI is an incredibly fast-growing industry requiring ever-increasing amounts of computing power. Microsoft alone is reportedly investing $50 billion into data center infrastructure in 2024 just to handle demand. AI also needs enormous amounts of raw data and training data, labeled into categories by humans.

Polosukhin believes decentralized blockchain-based marketplaces are the ideal solution to help crowdsource the required hardware and data. 

“You can use [blockchain] to build more effective marketplaces that are more equal,” he tells Magazine, explaining that AI projects currently need to negotiate with one or two big cloud providers like Amazon Web Services. Still, it’s difficult to access the required capacity due to a shortage of Nvidia’s A100 graphical processing units.

Spencer also cites blockchain-based marketplaces for AI resources as his current number one use case.  

“The first one is sourcing actual GPU chips,” he says. “Where there’s a big shortage of GPU chips, how do you source them [without] actually having a network that sources and provides and bootstraps a market?” 

Spencer highlights Akash Network, which offers a decentralized computing resources marketplace on Cosmos, and Render Network, which offers distributed GPU rendering.

“There are some pretty successful companies that actually do it at this point that are protocols.”

Another example of a decentralized marketplace offering cloud computing for AI is Aleph.im. Token holders in the project are able to access computing and storage resources to run projects.

Libertai.io, a decentralized large language model (LLM) is being run on Aleph.im. While you might think decentralization would slow an AI down to the point where it’s unable to function, Aleph.im founder Moshe Malawach explains that’s not the case:

“This is the thing: for one user the…