Event recap | AI & Blockchain
This post was originally published on blog.thu-tiba.org
On the 19th of September, TIBA co-hosted an event with TAIS, the AI Association of International Students from Tsinghua University. We invited two companies, Cortex Lab and Matrix, to give us a lecture on the connection between Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain. Later on, our guests from the two companies were joined by Professor Wenguang Chen from Tsinghua University and Shize Qin from TokenInsight for a panel discussion.
China is the biggest in the cryptocurrency market right now with over 60% of the hasheries coming from China.
“Every year we see a lot of projects launching from China and also we have a lot of mining facilities currently operating in China. It’s over 60% or 70% of the hasheries are from China,”
Shize Qin, analyst at TokenInsight, said during the panel discussion on our 19th September event at Tsinghua xSpace.
“For specific areas like mining, and we also have the exchange, and we also have the wallet, and the tokens we are launching.”
The event focused on the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain.
Chunfeng Liu, senior AI engineer at Matrix, believes using increased computer hardware and processing power to solve hash puzzles or blockchain mining is a “waste of electricity and hardware,” because “you only solve the puzzle itself. You create nothing else.” In 2017, blockchain mining consumed the same amount of energy as 2-million US homes.
Liu said Matrix wants to bridge the gap between deep-learning and blockchain by having miners solve deep-learning problems instead of only hash puzzles.
“By doing this, we ensure that every miner in the Matrix blockchain has some kind of hardware which is capable of doing some general purpose computing. Another approach is to have miners take turns in doing the mining.”
Zhen Li, chief blockchain engineer at Cortex, said blockchain and smart contracts are currently limited by computing power, but enabling AI on the block chain offers a “powerful solution.” Cortex offers a decentralized platform which aims to give users machine-learning models on the blockchain which they can use for smart contracts.
“The process of the democratization of AI is not democratic and if it is only controlled by a few people, it’s dangerous,” Li said.
During the Q&A session, Professor Wenguang Chen from Tsinghua University shared his belief that the value of decentralization is giving users free access and it is not dependent on one system or referee.
“I think blockchain added some more things more things to this peer-to-peer system by doing some encrypting to make it a bit more trustworthy.”
Chen added that blockchain can survive without the help of AI, but that Ethereum still has to find its feet. Ethereum allows you to customize your data on the blockchain for different purposes such as smart contracts.
“Bitcoin has it’s surest value by seeing the value there. It’s not for day to day payment, but it serves as a goal. But Ethereum does not show much more other that, because with smart contracts you can do a lot of things, a lot more things than blockchain, but it has a much smaller market than blockchain today, so there is some problem.”
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This article was written by Nico Gous and edited by Brian Seong and Péter Garamvölgyi. Photos were taken by Brian Seong.
