Some of blockchain’s earliest adopters are now deeply “entrenching” themselves in decentralized AI, with ecosystems like Bittensor (TAO) emerging as growth engines. These platforms are reshaping traditional venture capital models, enabling the best ideas to organically attract community support, staking and liquidity without the need for institutional gatekeepers.
That was one of the key takeaways from Cointelegraph’s interview with Chris Miglino, the co-founder and CEO of DNA Fund, a digital asset investment firm he runs alongside fellow serial entrepreneurs Brock Peirce and Scott Walker.
DNA Fund manages, among other things, five distinct funds across a range of strategies, such as a high-yield fund, an algorithmic trading fund, an AI compute fund, a liquid token fund and a venture fund — serving both company and investor capital.
Miglino, who hosted Cointelegraph at a DNA House event during the Consensus conference in Toronto, Canada, was particularly excited about the firm’s AI compute fund.
“The biggest thing that we’re working on in the whole ecosystem is our AI compute fund, where we’ve been entrenched into the TAO ecosystem,” said Miglino, referring to Bittensor, a decentralized, open-source machine learning network.
Bittensor’s backers say the network stands out for its subnets, which enable specialized, incentive-based marketplaces built around a specific AI or machine learning use case.
DNA Fund is “actively mining on different subnets,” having committed roughly $50 million worth of compute to the TAO ecosystem, Miglino said.
“We’re willing and ready to talk to anybody that wants to launch inside that ecosystem,” he said.
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‘Decentralized AI is consuming everything we’re doing’
Decentralized AI — the framework for developing and deploying artificial intelligence systems across a distributed network rather than a centralized authority — is currently the main focus at DNA House, Miglino said.
It’s “consuming everything we’re doing,” he said.
For Miglino, this paradigm has the opportunity to be “bigger than anything that’s ever existed […] I think it has the opportunity to be bigger than Bitcoin.”
While that may appear as a herculean task, given Bitcoin’s (BTC) $2.1 trillion market cap and status as the first successful decentralized monetary system of the information age, technologists broadly agree that AI will profoundly reshape human society.
DNA House is betting that ecosystems like Bittensor will drive that transformation in a decentralized way by offering developers the ability to launch businesses without having to raise outside capital:
“Develop on the ecosystem, get validators that believe in your idea, [and] that’ll attract the miners and the validators together and all of a sudden you’re in business. You don’t need to go out and raise a ton of money from a bunch of VCs.”
The idea that AI’s future will be decentralized is far from fringe. One of the earliest pioneers of artificial general intelligence, Ben Goertzel, told Cointelegraph that he realized the need for decentralization in AI as far back as the early 1990s, before even writing his first line of AI code.
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