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Bitcoin billionaire Barry Silbert talks about his next big bet—on ‘decentralized AI’
Barry Silbert isn’t done yet. The billionaire entrepreneur first made his mark in finance when, at age 17, he became the youngest person in the U.S. to obtain a stockbroker license. The Maryland native went on to become a Wall Street trader before launching alternative asset platform Second Market, which he sold to NASDAQ. Silbert then hit it big with Bitcoin, buying a hoard when the price was $11 in 2012, and building the crypto conglomerate known as Digital Currency Group. On Wednesday, he announced his next big project: Yuma, a subsidiary that aspires to compete with the likes of Google and OpenAI in the field of artificial intelligence.
The twist is that Yuma is going all in on a decentralized version of AI—the idea of distributing the powerful technology across a loose network of autonomous contributors instead of relying on a giant tech company to provide the service.
Speaking with Fortune, Silbert likened decentralized AI to the world wide web, which in the 1990s supplanted the “walled garden” version of the Internet run by a handful of tech firms. It’s unclear if a decentralized model of AI can hold its own in an industry where the leading firms depend on massive amounts of data, high priced chips and computing power. But Silbert says he is convinced a permissionless version of AI is better—so much so that he is becoming a hands on CEO for the first time in four years to lead Yuma.
AI and blockchain
Yuma’s decentralized AI ambitions revolve around a blockchain project called Bittensor, which launched in 2021 and offers tokens as incentives to spur people to contribute to a network of AI services. Launched in 2019 by a former Google engineer, Bittensor is not widely known but has attracted the support of wealthy investors including Silbert and venture capitalist Olaf Carlson-Wee, who have been buying up its token known as TAO.
Acknowledging that both tokens and AI have been popular fodder for hucksters, Silbert says Yuma is downplaying the crypto angles as “blockchain scares people away.” He says Yuma’s focus will instead be on helping to build a network of decentralized intelligence and computing services in the form of what Bittensor calls “subnets.” There are akin to applications and Yuma is currently supporting around 60 of them, but Silbert envisions there will soon be thousands.
Still, crypto is very much part of the equation as Bittensor and Yuma are counting on TAO tokens to be the incentives that persuade people to contribute to the decentralized AI network.
Source: finance.yahoo.com