Sahara AI, a decentralized platform, has secured $43 million in funding to establish a collaborative economy founded on blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI).
Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, and Polychain Capital led the round, with Samsung, Matrix Partners, dao5, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, SCB 10X, Canonical Capital, Mirana Ventures, Foresight Ventures, and other investors also participating.
The startup has been developing a platform since 2022 that will enable onchain attribution throughout the AI development cycle.
This platform will reward participants for operating infrastructure, fine-tuning a model, creating an autonomous agent, contributing knowledge, or developing an application.
“Most AI today is still immobilized in a Web2 paradigm, in which users exchange their knowledge for access to AI or machine learning tools.”
“There is frequently no transparency regarding the utilization of users’ proprietary models and agents by these centralized AI providers, and there is no protection or compensation for users’ contributions,” Sean Ren, CEO and co-founder of Sahara Labs, stated to Cointelegraph.
Sahara Blockchain
The Sahara Blockchain Protocols are the company’s commitment to providing a secure and transparent “copyright” framework for managing AI assets on the blockchain.
As per Ren, these protocols encompass AI-based solutions for asset tracking, licensing for access control, ownership for the protection of nontransferable records, and attribution for the distribution of revenue and the monitoring of contributions.
Ren asserted that this guarantees equitable compensation for all contributors, the preservation of data and model sovereignty, and the secure creation, sharing, and trading of AI assets, all while promoting inclusivity and preserving privacy.
The venture is also the brainchild of Tyler Zhou, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Sahara AI. Zhou is an investment director at Binance Labs, as evidenced by his LinkedIn profile.
“Our team identified this challenge within the current AI landscape and initiated the process of brainstorming solutions in Q2 2022 (pre-GPT era) as one of the earliest,” Ren stated about the purported lack of transparency and centralization of power among major technology companies that are developing AI solutions.
“Users frequently engage with AI-driven services without understanding the use of their data or the providence of the information that contributed to the AI’s outputs,” he continued.
He also noted that “as AI becomes more powerful, questions arise about who controls these systems and how they are used.”
Sahara’s testnet and mainnet are expected to be operational shortly.
