Hashed’s Simon Kim believes that the future of artificial intelligence lies in a radical change: breaking the black box of centralized models like OpenAI and building a decentralized, transparent ecosystem powered by blockchain.
For Kim, CEO of South Korea’s leading crypto VC fund, the urgency is clear. The unchecked centralization of AI threatens to create a “god” we don’t understand, while blockchain offers tools to reward creators, protect intellectual property, and provide transparency to generative AI – which has been wide criticized for its bias and selective reasoning.
“AI is being centralized. OpenAI is not open, and it is controlled by very few people, so it is quite dangerous. Making this kind of (closed source) foundational model is like making a ‘god’, but we don’t know how it works,” he said in an interview with CoinDesk.
Kim believes that open-source AI models like Meta’s Llama are an example of how AI can be developed with decentralization and transparency in mind.
But he said the lack of a robust incentive mechanism for data providers – meaning all internet users – is still a problem.
“AI models simply crawl the original content on the web and provide answers without paying the creators,” Kim said.
Kim believes we can fix this by building a “copyright layer” where rights holders can track how their content is being used – and re-used – by AI while getting paid along the way.
Hashed thinks it has found a solution to this Storyan IP management protocol led by it a Series-B round last year.
The fund has not yet invested in any decentralized AI projects, but it thinks it is building exposure to the space through its investment in Story.
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“We really need a blockchain-based IP system to incentivize the original creator, the creator and the remixer,” Kim continued.
Kim is far from the only voice calling for open source AI development. A growing chorus of voices from Mark Zuckerberg of Meta in Economist editorial board everyone agrees that the black box of closed source AI – the god whose decisions and actions remain a mystery – has to go for the industry to mature.
But it’s up to Kim to convince them that the solution lies in blockchain and crypto.
