The Intersection of AI & Blockchain: Accelerating Growth & Enhancing Security

Blockchain and AI are game-changing technologies, each having the potential to revolutionize multiple industries. Most often though, they are siloed off from one another, being treated as competing technologies vying for companies’ time and money. Yet this mentality limits both technologies’ transformative potential. Many in the blockchain community believe that the true value of the technology is best realized when combined with other groundbreaking technologies. By pairing blockchain and AI, companies can achieve new heights of innovation while making the most of their tech investments.

Understanding Blockchain’s Role in AI Development?

One major reason to consider pairing blockchain with AI is that the former can help address some of the biggest challenges facing the latter. While AI has garnered a great deal of attention over the past few years, this has come with a fair amount of scrutiny regarding the tech’s safety, accuracy, and security. For all of the practical use cases for AI, businesses increasingly realize that they always trust its output, whether due to built-in biases, hallucinating large language models, or possible cybersecurity risks. Additionally, government regulators are putting more pressure on companies to ensure the transparency and accountability of their algorithms.?

The idea of combining blockchain with other data-driven technologies is hardly new: as early as the late 1980s, scientists like Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber saw the importance of managing, authenticating, and verifying data, something that’s become increasingly important in our data-driven world. They developed the cryptographic hash function, which generated a unique serial number that served as a fingerprint for each file, making even the slightest change in a file detectable. Eventually, that would be paired with a central timestamp system, which effectively serves as the template for the decentralized system found in blockchain. With this in mind, one could argue that blockchain is a natural fit for modern AI development.?

There are two major ways that blockchain can enhance AI development - by streamlining data verification and by democratizing access to AI as a whole.?

Blockchain and Data Verification

Part of what makes blockchain so valuable for AI development is because of its distributed ledger technology (DLT), it can track what data an algorithm was trained on, when, and by whom, as well as what steps were taken to vet and verify that data. While most companies building AI models will try to follow the data trail if something goes wrong, blockchain would make this process much more efficient, ensuring there are consistent and trustworthy development records.

Blockchain and the Democratization of AI?

Another way blockchain benefits AI development is that it opens up the possibilities of who can effectively implement AI. Up until recently, AI was largely used by larger tech-centric companies, but with the rise of more affordable AI tools, smaller businesses are looking to use it as well. Data management powered by blockchain can streamline what would otherwise be expensive and time-consuming, ensuring smaller businesses can keep up with larger enterprises. Blockchain also democratizes access to AI through decentralized AI platforms, where businesses can contribute their proprietary data to build valuable models and access.

The Value of a Collaborative Approach?

We often think of innovation as solitary: a lone genius inventor or a new technology that upends industries all on its own. More often than not though, innovation is a collaborative process. AI and blockchain are transformative technologies separately, but together they can accelerate their transformative potential, opening up a new wave of possibilities. This collaborative approach also means that tech companies that may have once considered themselves rivals could find greater success through partnership and cooperation. When we do away with the notion that AI and blockchain are competing and instead see what they can do together, we reshape the future of business and technology.?