Microsoft using Ethereum blockchain to democratize machine learning and AI

The Ethereum blockchain is being used by engineers at Microsoft to "Democratize" AI and machine learning, making these typically centralized and costly systems more accessible to everyone.

Smart contracts and AI. Justin Harris, a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, saw that Ethereum smart contracts have the potential to fundamentally change how machine learning and AI models are designed.

Access to well-designed machine learning algorithms can be problematic, according to Harris.

"One in which people will be able to easily and cost-effectively run machine learning models with technology they already have, such as browsers and apps on their phones and other devices."

In the "Spirit of democratizing AI," Harris introduced a new open-source initiative from Microsoft: Decentralized & Collaborative AI on Blockchain.

In the new paradigm, Harris envision incentives and rewards for people interacting with-and improving-these machine learning algorithms.

At the time, updating the model only cost $0.25 on the Ethereum blockchain in fees.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are notoriously hungry for computation.

Developers need to work around this by using models which are efficient to train, or by doing the hard data-crunching off-chain; they could even be integrated using oracles through a service like Chainlink.

"As blockchain technology advances, we anticipate that more applications for collaboration between people and machine learning models will become available, and we hope to see future research in scaling to more complex models along with new incentive mechanisms."