Data has always been a hot commodity, but the advent of modern AI models pushed demand to unprecedented highs. With a data shortage looming overhead, it may be smart to move away from traditional sourcing methods and look toward decentralized data providers.
How decentralized data collection changes the game
Not only is there a lack of data, but there’s also a huge problem with traditional, centralized data collection. For starters, it lacks transparency. This leads to what’s called a black box problem, a scenario in which it’s impossible to know how and where the data was sourced and whether it was collected ethically.
At the same time, a centralized approach provides too much power to a handful of privately-owned companies that have access to large amounts of data – think Google, OpenAI, and Apple. These entities are already dominating the market, and considering that using their solutions also provides them with more data, the result is a vicious cycle that’s tough to break out of and may eventually cause a full-fledged monopoly.
All this changes with community-driven data collection. Besides reducing reliance on private companies, it introduces some much-needed transparency into data sourcing. Everything is recorded on the blockchain, with data being stored on multiple nodes instead of being kept by a single party. For instance, such a structure allows users to trace where and how their information is used, but more importantly, it significantly reduces the risk of manipulation.
Best decentralized AI data collection tools
Since there is growing interest in decentralized data, a growing number of platforms are stepping up to the challenge. Here are some of the top community-based AI data collection platforms you can check out right now:
1. OORT
OORT is a completely decentralized AI ecosystem created to facilitate accessibility in the AI industry. Everything is community-owned, including compute resources that are sourced with a network of over 74k nodes scattered over 118 countries.
The ecosystem allows businesses to build and train AI models without relying on private companies or purchasing expensive hardware. This also includes OORT Storage, a blockchain-based distributed storage network where the community is sharing their (drumroll) unused storage.
Learn more: Meet OORT: A Leading Cloud for Decentralized AI
However, the biggest game changer is OORT’s fully decentralized DataHub, which is used for gathering reliable, diverse, and robust data that enterprises can use to train new AI models. It works by incentivizing a network of over 200k contributors to generate high-quality, diverse datasets, including images, video, and audio. Since contributors are rewarded, organizations can quickly set up effective data collection campaigns and get fast results of the highest quality.
Image source: OORT DataHub
Owing to the sheer power of the process, OORT hit the news recently, when community-sourced datasets reached the number 1 rankings in multiple categories on Google’s Kaggle platform according to numerous reports.
Concurrently, OORT is rolling out Deimos II (personal edge nodes) with the ability of on-device LLM interference so users can set up smaller AI models locally.
2. Ocean Protocol
A decentralized platform, Ocean Protocol monetizes data for ML and AI datasets. It does so through tokenization on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing data providers to use the Ocean Protocol marketplace and securely sell access to data to other parties while retaining control of their assets.
The biggest benefit of such data collection type is access to data that is generally more expensive and tricky to source, since everyone can tokenize data. This includes both private and value-added data, which is a fancy version of an optimized or enhanced version of a public dataset.
Image source: Data Science Hub
Price is dictated either by the provider or price discovery by implementing an automated market maker function that allows sellers to keep the majority of proceeds from the sale, while a small piece is divided amongst the community.
3. Vana
Vana is another decentralized platform where the community can pool and monetize (tokenize) a variety of personal datasets. By leveraging data liquidity pools, contributors can retain their ownership rights while also receiving fair rewards for their effort.
This platform and AI are a match made in heaven, as developers can freely access data pools through smart contracts on the blockchain. Since blockchain technology records everything, it ensures that the contributors are justly compensated when their data contributes to the training of applications and new AI models. In other words, the entire system of sourcing and “giving away” data is completely transparent.
Image source: Data Collectives
The icing on the cake is the fact that the platform is also community-governed, and data contributors have a say in all governance decisions.
4. Sahara AI
Last but not least, there’s Sahara AI, a decentralized AI data marketplace and knowledge agent platform. The goal behind the project is to democratize AI technology and make it much more accessible to individuals and businesses.
Image source: Data Services
Similar to OORT, Sahara AI also provides access to data, computing resources, and AI models while allowing users monetization options through blockchain-based attributions. Put differently, everything from contributing data, helping with training models, and doing modifications is recorded on the blockchain and suitably rewarded.
In addition to its own Layer 1 blockchain, Sahara AI offers an AI marketplace, where enterprises and developers can sell or license data and AI models, and a compute and storage layer where users contribute GPU and storage resources.
Paving the way for a decentralized future
We live in a world where corporations control everything AI-related, from data itself to computing power. Naturally, this limits innovation and leaves everyone from model creators to data providers (and even developers) without a fair share of their profits.
While it appears the status quo will never change, the success of the projects mentioned above proves there is hope. Granted, the full impact of democratization will be noticeable once decentralized AI takes hold in the mainstream, but for the time being, the fact that there is a viable alternative to corporate monopoly is a welcome sight indeed.
