Dfinity Foundation Launches $5 Million Grant Program

A new $5 million grant program aims to advance applications of artificial intelligence in blockchain technology and smart contracts.

The program will fund the development of decentralized artificial intelligence, or “DeAI” for short, and it was launched today by the non-profit Dfinity Foundation.

Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) tokens will be awarded in increments of $5,000, $25,000, $50,000, and $100,000, with the $100,000 level reserved for larger teams or developers who have already completed work under a smaller grant.

Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist of the Dfinity Foundation, told Decrypt in an interview, “We’re looking for serious people who can use the Internet’s AI compute units.” We are highly interested in this application.

The Internet Computer blockchain will function as an autonomous cloud that enables fully decentralized AI models to operate entirely on the blockchain without the need for centralized cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services.

Williams cited projects that already use AI on the Internet Computer blockchain, such as Dmail for decentralized email and Itoka, a platform for AI-generated music creation.

In May, the Dfinity Foundation hosted the BUIDL Bitcoin hackathon, during which more than 200 developers collaborated on decentralized applications to support Bitcoin transactions on the Internet Computer blockchain.

While it has become fashionable to shoehorn AI into Web3 projects, Williams says the goal is to move beyond “blockchain theater” and focus on integrating AI with blockchain technology meaningfully.

“Many people are claiming that their blockchain supports AI,” Williams said. “They mean that the wallet has ChatGPT integration or something similar. “It has nothing to do with artificial intelligence or blockchain.”

The Dfinity Foundation asserts that using Internet computers to train AI models offers numerous advantages, such as operating in a transparent, public network, executing AI securely and verifiably, and producing reliable results.

“We’re doing it for things like medical AIs,” Williams explained.

To create a large language model specializing in dispensing medical advice, you must ensure that the models and your immediate response have not been altered.