What are your thoughts on Bittensor?

Submitted by DesperateProblem7418 t3_114vev7 in singularity

First of all, no, this is not a shill post. I'm genuinely curious what people think about this company's approach to decentralized AI. I can't get any non biased opinions since everyone seems to be hoarding their token which is what caused me to make a post on this sub. I also want to state right at the beginning that I have no interest in crypto or their token, but I'm really interested in their tech.

Here is what Bittensor is directly from their website:

"Bittensor is an open-source protocol that powers a decentralized, blockchain-based machine learning network. Machine learning models train collaboratively and are rewarded in TAO according to the informational value they offer the collective. TAO also grants external access, allowing users to extract information from the network while tuning its activities to their needs.

Ultimately, our vision is to create a pure market for artificial intelligence, an incentivized arena in which consumers and producers of this valuable commodity can interact in a trustless, open and transparent context.

Bittensor enables:

A novel, optimized strategy for the development and distribution of artificial intelligence technology by leveraging the possibilities of a distributed ledger. Specifically, its facilitation of open access/ownership, decentralized governance, and the ability to harness globally-distributed resources of computing power and innovation within an incentivized framework.

An open-source repository of machine intelligence, accessible to anyone, anywhere, thus creating the conditions for open and permission-less innovation on a global internet scale.

Distribution of rewards and network ownership to users in direct proportion to the value they have added."

I like this since the combination of distributed AI, blockchain, DAO and similar technologies will result in a networked intelligence that surpasses any current or future standalone AGI system. The advantage of distributed systems is that they incorporate human brains + other network activity to reach a consensus, which eliminates concerns about alignment. The effectiveness of complex systems is determined more by their structure than their rules, and if consensus is built into the structure, it will impact all the emerging properties. The main goal of advanced AI system or even AGI is to maximize human consensus, which means that it will be forced to engage in collective thinking and discussion for all its decisions.

The Bittensor team also claim that AI models can learn from each other and share their data. Anyone from Google to a small research team can plug in their model and contribute to the network. People have taken this to its logical conclusion that Bittensor because of that could lead to some form of an AGI system.

Their first product release will be a chat bot similar to ChatGPT. They are currently collecting signups for its beta. Even though it will most likely be much less impressive it seems like it will exponentially improve as more data/models join the network. Through time it could lead to direct competition with Google's Bard or OpenAI's ChatGPT.

What are your thoughts on this? Is this purely running on hype or is there potential here for something big?

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Comments

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turnip_burrito t1_j8z6a7x wrote

Why would I use blockchain when I can safely use a single service provider? This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

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Zer0D0wn83 t1_j8yc2s8 wrote

The first question to ask when learning about a project that uses crypto/block chain is 'can we achieve the same thing but without crypto/block chain?'

I haven't seen a case where the he answer isn't yes

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DesperateProblem7418 OP t1_j8yl8xd wrote

No. The decentralization and consensus mechanism requires a token, similar to Bitcoin.

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ohmsalad t1_j920dtk wrote

chatgpt says it wrote the above. While this can be considered technically possible, in reality there are many things that have to be figured out, like processing power needs homogeneity in p2p and distributed training systems, that means different gpus/cpus and pc configurations won't work well if at all together, a DAO cannot do that yet, how about their training sets? How about latency and bandwidth? With current blockchain speeds and confirmations that would take centuries. We are not there yet, when we figure out how to P2P train an LLM we are going to do it without the use of a blockchain. This looks to me as an overambitious project by ill-informed people or a scam.

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onil_gova t1_ja0tlsm wrote

I agree, i don't think our current methods of training models, mainly back propagation, can be distributed like across heterogeneous machines with various latencies, just seem impractical and not likely to scale. I can't imagine what would happen if a node goes down. Do you just lose those neurons? Is their self correcting mechanic? Are all the other nodes waiting? We dont currently have methods for training a partial model and scaling up and down with the inclusion or removal of neurons. And no dropout is not doing this. The models are usually static from creating to fully trained.

Another thing that im not clear about is that maybe you are not contributing training a model but with a trained model. I dont see how having a collection of trained models would lead to AGI. I also have a lot of doubts since it seems like we need to solve a lot of problems before something like this is practical or possible.

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Lawjarp2 t1_j95b210 wrote

It's greedy and brings out the worst capitalistic tendencies in people. It's also inefficient and straight up stupid. You don't need the reward mechanism, as good that seems, it's a way to make it so that some people have more than others. This is the most terrible thing one could do with AGI.

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