The Decentralized AI Society Launches to Ensure AI Serves Humanity's Broad Interests

Crypto and Web3 industry leaders launched the Decentralized AI Society (DAIS), an umbrella organization helping builders of decentralized learning models, data providers, hardware suppliers and advocates of safe and beneficial AI to collectively ensure that artificial intelligence serves humanity's broad interests rather than a select few tech giants.

The Decentralized AI Society (DAIS) launched on Monday with a mission to steer the development and deployment of artificial intelligence in a safe and beneficial direction.

The society is a collective of crypto and Web3 industry leaders, including Ceti, Filecoin Foundation, Bloq, Hypercycle, Morpheus, Hemi, Odyssey and Lumerin. Together, they aim to ensure that AI serves humanity's broad interests, rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants.

“If AI is to serve humanity, then control over data, learning models, inference and computing resources must be decentralized in ways the Web currently is not,” the founders said in a statement.

To achieve this goal, DAIS will serve as an information clearinghouse and collective action body, facilitating coordination among decentralized AI (DeAI) developers while allowing them to retain their competitive edge. The society will also focus on several critical areas: self-sovereign data, open-source code, privacy, decentralized infrastructure, and ethical and inclusive AI development.

The initial activities of DAIS will include hosting high-profile events, forming working committees, producing valuable research reports, and creating a shared data lake for industry-wide insights. Moreover, DAIS plans to establish an accelerator program for startups, sponsor innovation prizes, and provide essential professional services to its members.

The society's founding members and advisors strongly believe that if AI is to be developed and deployed in a safe and beneficial manner, it must be built on the principles of crypto and blockchain, which include self-sovereign data, open-source code, privacy, and decentralized infrastructure. Their goal is to build an internet of AI that benefits everyone, not just the few.

“Throughout history, open and distributed models have ultimately outpaced closed systems in driving innovation and progress, due to the greater access to information and ideas unlocked by this approach,” the founders said.

The launch of DAIS comes at a critical juncture, as large-language models and generative AI are poised to accelerate the development of machine learning and computational capacity, promising to alter every aspect of our lives. However, if the current concentration of internet power is extended into the AI era, the privacy abuses, societal divides, and economic imbalances that marked the Web2 period will only worsen.

The founders of DAIS are convinced that if we want AI to be developed and deployed in a way that benefits humanity, it must be built on the principles of self-sovereign data, open-source code, privacy, and decentralized infrastructure that are the ethos of crypto and blockchain. The goal is to build an internet of AI that benefits everyone, not just the few.