#340 Steffen Cruz: Training AI Without Data Centres

So my name is Stefan Crews. I am, I'm the cofounder and the CTO of Microcosmos. I hold a PhD in subatomic physics in University of British Columbia. So I was a I was a physics researcher for the beginning of my career, and then I pivoted to AI when it became apparent to me that there's a lot of opportunity for scientists that are just about to graduate from their, from their postgraduate studies. And and there's just there's there's an entirely new science sort of being born and developed in real time before us, and I think my decision is one that a lot of other people have made as well where they want to go from, being in what can feel like the sort of the old school machinery of of traditional science in academia where things move slow and your contributions can be very narrow and sparse to becoming a pioneer of this entirely new exciting thing, which is not only abstract and theoretical, but it's being applied in new and interesting ways constantly. So when I saw that, I I I concluded my PhD, and I decided to leap, leap leaped out of academia and into sort of the application of, AI and also physics in in various private sector domains such as manufacturing and systems optimization. Following that, I I discovered BitTensor, which is a very interesting AI, blockchain project. And, ostensibly, the purpose of BitTensor is to allow AI to be developed in a way that is fully democratized and is sort of done in a global a global way with incentives. And I thought that was such a fascinating, proposal that I decided to join the network. I've been within the BitTensor ecosystem for around three years now, and I have been relentlessly experimenting and building within BitTensor, the kind of things that I think would make a lot of sense and would bring a lot of value to the world using a blockchain as a prerequisite tool to enable AI research to be done in various ways and scales that will be very difficult otherwise. Yeah. And specifically well, first, let's talk about BitTensor. But before you began, we were talking about, how there are a few of these blockchain ecosystems, for either training or, or marketing, AI models or AI applications. And I'm familiar with SingularityNET. Bit tensor is much larger. Is that right? Is it the largest of these or one of the largest, and how many are there? I believe so. So bit tensor is actually over a 100 projects under a trench coat, and I think that's also why it feels so encompassing and so large. And this is what is, very interesting about BitTensor is it doesn't seek to solve a specific narrow problem in the AI industry. It's not like trying to solve something like how do we provide people with access to models, or how do we train models, or how do we do …