Interpreting the open source AI platform OpenGradient: Why was it selected for incubation in the a16z startup accelerator and favored by Balaji?

Original translation: Scof, ChainCatcher

Today, the centralized open source AI platform OpenGradient announced the completion of a $8.5 million seed round of financing. a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, Foresight Ventures, SV Angel, Coinbase Ventures, SALT Fund and Symbolic Capital participated in the investment. Angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin and Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal and other well-known industry figures also participated as angel investors.

The funds will be used to continue building decentralized infrastructure, deploying solutions and tools for AI and Web3 developers, and advancing applied ML research to develop an open source AI ecosystem on the blockchain. OpenGradient's testnet is expected to be open to developers in the fourth quarter of 2024.

In early September, OpenGradient was also selected for the a16z Crypto Fall Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) program. a16z CSX will invest at least $500,000 in each selected company, and the project will be trained for 8 weeks in New York City to gain first-hand experience with top crypto founders, receive guidance and support from the a16z crypto investment and operations team, and connect with other companies and the broader a16z network.

According to the official website, OpenGradient is the first decentralized platform for open source AI model hosting, secure execution, proxy reasoning, and application deployment. OpenGradient's new heterogeneous AI computing architecture (HACA) enables permissionless AI reasoning, statistical analysis, data processing, and proxy execution to run securely and scalably end-to-end through smart contracts, while building a web platform designed to accelerate AI research. OpenGradient enables developers to seamlessly leverage open source models and use computation to implement risk management, ML optimization, AI agents, anti-sybil, defi mechanism design and other functions.

The following introduction is compiled from OpenGradient official blog, with deletions and additions:

The Convergence of AI and Blockchain

AI has become an integral part of our daily lives: from driving smartphone assistants and recommendation algorithms to conversational robo-advisors that advise on stock recommendations, AI has impacted nearly every aspect of modern society. However, the current state of AI is not only centralized and controlled by a few tech giants who can arbitrarily restrict access to AI models, but also lacks sufficient assurance and security in its computational processes to be suitable for applications that require a high degree of verifiability, such as blockchain applications. As a result, while AI has become ubiquitous in augmenting traditional applications, Web3 protocols lag behind Web2 in terms of complexity, optimization, and user experience.

Main barriers to AI integration into Web3:

· Blockchains are limited by virtual machine limitations and computational power

· Off-chain reasoning is trustworthy but vulnerable

· High hardware requirements and computational costs for hosting and serving AI models

· Requires custom infrastructure to be built for trust-minimized reasoning (via zkML, trusted execution environments, etc.), which is complex

· Lack of research exploring the design space of AI-driven Web3 applications.

The emergence of OpenGradient

OpenGradient is a solution that merges blockchain and artificial intelligence to solve their respective problems. OpenGradient is the first permissionless platform for open source model hosting, secure reasoning, proxy reasoning, and application deployment.

By developing AI tools, feature-rich libraries, and an innovative decentralized platform built on blockchain, OpenGradient not only makes the integration of AI workflows into Web3 applications secure and seamless, but also decentralizes and democratizes access to AI models.

OpenGradient is building an EVM-compatible blockchain network that aims to be a scalable and secure execution layer for AI. The network takes a revolutionary approach to reshaping blockchain architecture by allowing developers to infer AI models directly from their Solidity smart contracts through simple function calls.

Because the OpenGradient Network provides access to inference AI models directly through pre-compilation in smart contracts, it is able to maximize the composability of smart contracts.

Core products and initiatives include:

· Web3 AI Research - OpenGradient's research team drives innovation in open source AI in crypto by building models for DeFi risk analysis, AMM dynamic fee optimization, DePIN reputation, and more.

· Model Center - OpenGradient's Model Center is the Web3 version of HuggingFace: an easy-to-use web portal where any developer can upload, download, or access any AI model in our decentralized and censorship-resistant file storage.

· OG SDK - The OG Python SDK provides seamless access to OpenGradient functionality, including model access, secure reasoning, proof/certified retrieval, and more.

· NeuroML- NeuroML allows developers to leverage models to implement capabilities such as ML optimization, systemic risk management, AI agents, witch defense, DeFi mechanism design, etc., seamlessly built into our AI application ecosystem.

· HACA Infrastructure- OpenGradient's proprietary Hybrid AI Compute Architecture (HACA) scales and protects on-chain AI workflows through node specialization, providing capabilities such as reasoning, agent reasoning, statistical analysis, etc.

Team Information

OpenGradient is headquartered in New York City, and the team is composed of global talents with deep expertise in AI/ML, blockchain, cryptocurrency, and Web3 ecosystems. Team members come from technology companies such as Google, Coinbase, Ripple, Intel, Palantir, etc.

Matthew Wang, co-founder and CEO, holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Northwestern University and is a research engineer at Two Sigma with experience in quantitative modeling and machine learning research.

Adam Balogh, co-founder and CTO, was the head of the AI platform at Palantir Technologies and has seven years of experience in the industry. He holds a master’s degree in advanced computing from Imperial College London.

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