The increasing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has led to a shortage of hardware resources and expensive cloud service costs. However, decentralized infrastructure could challenge the reliance on centralized players.
During the ETHGlobal event in London, Harry Grieve, co-founder of machine learning compute network Gensyn, spoke exclusively to Cointelegraph about how peer-to-peer computing networks have the potential to challenge services like Amazon Web Services.
Gensyn is an upcoming decentralized network that will allow individuals to connect to various devices across the internet to train machine learning models. The company has received backing from several Web3 venture capital firms and raised $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz in 2023.
Grieve believes that the network holds significant potential as the internet evolves into a more dynamic representation of information, empowering “self-sovereignty and computational liberty online.”
Gensyn has been in development since 2020, with Grieve and co-founder Ben Fielding researching machine learning computing for training and decentralized verifiable systems. They have been working to solve a threefold problem with blockchain-based technology.
The challenge lies in how to peer with an untrusted device and train a machine learning model that can’t fit on that single device. Additionally, they aim to achieve the scale of the entire system and unit economic outcomes comparable to AWS.
Gensyn’s litepaper describes the protocol as “a layer-1 trustless protocol for deep learning computation.” Participants in the network are directly and immediately rewarded for providing computing resources and performing ML tasks.
Grieve takes inspiration from the ideals of the Bitcoin protocol and believes in the early days of Bitcoin mining when smaller devices could be used. The long-term plan for Gensyn is to make it a tool that allows a wide range of users and hardware to provide or access computing resources for ML training.
While the initial launch will target users with more GPUs, Grieve envisions people building on top of Gensyn to create more user-friendly applications. Ultimately, individuals with laptops will be able to download their client and connect to the network.
Apple Silicon, the chips powering Apple devices, offer significant global computing resources. Grieve notes that research into Apple M2 and M3 chips shows that they are on par with mid-tier Nvidia RTX GPUs.
This presents two potential benefits for protocols like Gensyn, as they can tap into a wide range of devices for their global supercluster. Grieve also believes that in the future, there will be more powerful edge devices, and decentralization across multiple devices while verifying device-agnostically is crucial.
In conclusion, decentralized infrastructure has the potential to challenge the dominance of centralized players in the AI and ML field. Gensyn aims to create a decentralized network that allows individuals to connect to various devices for training machine learning models. With the support of Web3 venture capital firms and $50 million in funding, Gensyn holds significant promise for the future of peer-to-peer computing networks.