Accenture reports that artificial intelligence (AI) could become the fuel of economic growth at global scale. By 2035, companies may change the way work is performed with AI implementations. As a collection of technologies that can understand, act, and learn, AI-based apps can perform on their own when given the right data. Trained properly, they transcend and amplify labor, thereby promoting economic growth.

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Although the impact of AI on emerging technologies is visible and may streamline labor productivity, only the largest companies afford the costs involved. Smaller players often do not have the capital to handle expensive datasets, which leaves them incapable of exploiting potentially innovative solutions. A viable alternative for data scientists and crowdworkers lies in the hands of Blockchain technology.

Building AI apps on Blockchain

Dbrain, a new project built on the Ethereum Blockchain leverages smart contracts to develop a simple tool that allows everyone to label and validate data in exchange for cryptocurrency. Large high-quality datasets contribute more than 80% to AI’s success, and are more important for AI applications than algorithms. Those datasets are still labeled by hand and require a lot of manual labor. Dbrain introduces a platform that targets businesses and data scientists that need the data to develop AI solutions, as well as crowdworkers in developing countries that want to earn an extra income and get paid in cryptocurrency.

The Dbrain mission is to democratize AI, making it accessible to everyone. By building a community of businesses, data scientists and labelers, AI development and deployment can be made into a working product faster, easier and more affordable to companies with limited budgets.

A business model that aims to disrupt the AI industry

By linking all parties involved in AI production on a platform powered by Blockchain, Dbrain is looking to develop the next-generation of an AI-based marketplace; an ecosystem for companies where they can acquire convenient AI solutions and request customized AI-based integration based on their needs and wants.

By building smart contracts on Ethereum, Dbrain plans to use its own internal protocols to solve fundamental AI-based development, execution, and adoption challenges such as:

• Dataset quality where the data labeling efforts of developers and data scientists are dealt with validation issues. On Dbrain, all tasks performed by crowdworkers are validated through the platform’s in-house SPOCK protocol.
• Trust and security where data owners are at risk of losing both their data and their revenue when dealing with third parties. On Dbrain, the information is secured by the PICARD protocol, allowing developers to gain access to datasets without having to download them.
• Infrastructure costs concerned with businesses that require AI developers to use AI-based solutions. On Dbrain, access is done through a scalable, agile computing infrastructure that trains and deploys apps, and provides access to both human resources and raw data. All labeling tools are user-friendly to help workers gain easy access to the image labeling process.

Following its mission to tackle challenges pertaining to quality of dataset, security, and infrastructure costs, Dbrain aims to have a complete AI production line integrated with its platform; thus combine labeling functionality, ensure payment validation is transparent, and provide customized AI solutions within a single product.

It’s a win-win strategy for all participants in the AI market. The platform aims to reach the 2 billion people around the world who do not have bank accounts (primarily in low-income countries) and gives them income streams in tokens; which are often more stable than local fiat currencies. Companies could reduce data labeling costs by 2–10x compared to, for example, using AMT in the U.S. All payments are made in crypto, so users don’t have to worry about different banking systems or the ups and downs of local economies.