Venture Capital Heavyweight A16z Crypto led a $15 million seed round investment in Poseidon, a decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) data layer.
Poseidon is being built to provide access to training data for “trackable, enforceable, monetized” robotics and AI models, according to a announcement released in an email Tuesday.
The project was incubated by another A16Z portfolio company, Intellectual Property (IP)-based Protocol Story. The purpose of Story is to transform IP into programmable assets that can be licensed and managed using smart contracts on the blockchain.
“The AI Foundation model is already running out of training data that is easiest to access,” Chris Dixon, managing partner at A16Z Crypto, said in an email.
“Poseidon's distributed data layer is sought to establish a new economic foundation for the Internet, and aims to reward creators and suppliers to provide the diverse input needed for next-generation intelligent systems.”
AI models, particularly the generated AI, are often trained on vast datasets that have been scraped from the Internet. This includes copyrighted works such as books, art, music, and chords. Some creatives argue that this is used for commercial purposes without permission or compensation, and constitutes misuse and copyright infringement. This practice has already led to several lawsuits.
This friction highlights how AI and blockchain technology can interact, along with decentralization, providing secure and controlled data sharing, allowing multiple stakeholders to contribute to large-scale model training without compromising privacy or unique information.
Creating diverse datasets opens up the possibility of data monetization and authors are compensated for their use of the work.
