Ethereum Blockchain Being Utilised By Microsoft For AI & Machine Learning

The Ethereum blockchain is turning out to be a popular one as engineers at the tech giant, Microsoft is now using it to democratise AI and machine learning making these typically centralised and costly systems more available to everyone.

Smart contracts have the potential to profoundly impact how data is managed. They are immutable and will give developers the chance to reward users for taking part as well as contributing. Furthermore, when it comes to the Ethererum blockchain, thousands of decentralised nodes all over the world ensure that the code is always available which would essentially remove the problem of downtime.

Altering machine learning

A senior software development engineer at Microsoft, Justin Harris saw that Ethereum smart contracts have the potential to essentially alter the design of AI models and machine learning.

According to Harris, having access to a well-designed machine learning algorithms can become a bit of an issue. Because of the centralised manner of the algorithms, they are typically sold on a per-query basis, and they are trained using the owners expensive data. He states:

“One in which people will be able to easily and cost-effectively run machine learning models with technology they already have, such as browsers and apps on their phones and other devices.”

Harris went onto introducing a new open-source initiative from Microsoft dubbed, Decentralized & Collaborative AI on Blockchain.

With this new model, Harris pictures incentives for people involved with these machine learning algorithms. 

As reported by CryptoSlate:

“These algorithms would be free to use for evaluating predictions, which is ideal for things like building personal assistants or making systems that produce user recommendations.

Some potential ways to crowdsource such a system, Harris suggests, include gamification—like what is seen on Reddit. Or, building in prediction markets similar to what Augur is pioneering. Or, even creating “self assessment,” where users pay a deposit and those who make good contributions are rewarded at the expense of bad contributions.”

In terms of the future for the role of blockchain in AI, Harris states:

“As blockchain technology advances, we anticipate that more applications for collaboration between people and machine learning models will become available, and we hope to see future research in scaling to more complex models along with new incentive mechanisms.”