Decentralized AI Society Launched to Fight Tech Giants Who 'Own the Regulators'

• Eight founding members have started what they call the Decentralized AI Society (DAIS) to fight the possibility of tech giants holding an AI monopoly.
• The chairman of DAIS is Michael Casey who was formerly CoinDesk’s chief content officer

SINGAPORE — Industry leaders have launched a non-profit organization called the Decentralized AI Society (DAIS), dedicated to tackling the probability of the monopolization of the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

The group is headed by Michael Casey, formerly CoinDesk’s chief content officer and chair of Consensus, the crypto media company's annual conference.

"The decentralized AI society is acknowledging the fact that centralized platforms in the AI era have a massive head start," Casey told CoinDesk in an interview on the sidelines of the Token2049 blockchain conference in Singapore on Tuesday. "They own all the data, they own all the compute, and I would say they own the regulators."

The eight founding members of DAIS include CETI AI, Filecoin Foundation, Bloq, Hypercycle, Morpheus, Hemi, Odyssey and Lumerin.

According to the new organization, DAIS aims to tackle four problems:

• Bringing capital to the decentralized AI world in what has already become an arms race for resources like graphical processing units (GPUs) and the data centers that compute together.
• Shaping policy to craft AI regulations.
• Education and promotion of decentralized AI.
• Engineering to create new algorithms for learning models in a distributed way.

"What choice do we have," Casey said, but to fight for a decentralized form of AI, given the power of tech giants like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Apple?

"I never accept the idea that this is too difficult," he said. "Somebody has to resolve the challenge."

Read More: The Future of AI Is Decentralized