The cost of artificial intelligence can sometimes be described as a black hole on the corporate balance sheet, massive CPE, closed systems, and opaque residual value, the Yuma is re-engineering the evaluation stack for decentralized intelligence by leveraging the bitten so network.
Yuma is seeking to transform traditional corporate cost centers into strategic asset classes.
Well joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange to explain is Evan Malanga, Yuma's Chief revenue officer, a subsidiary of the Digital Currency Group.
Evan, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me, Remy.
Well, first and foremost, when it comes to artificial intelligence, we know this is a broad sector to watch.
So tell us about this intersection of crypto and AI.
Well, I think fundamentally there's a little bit of like an ethos building here, right?
If you look at the AI sector today, there's a lot of dollars being raised into very few companies, right?
And there's A walled garden forming that is increasing barriers to entry.
It creates problems for investor access, high barriers to entry for builders, and what this is doing, leveraging token-based incentives, the Tor network is reducing those barriers, creating opportunity for investors to access a wide swath of creative AI projects and allow builders to come on to a decentralized protocol and start building in a more free market manner.
And for viewers out there who may not be familiar with this, can you explain the difference between centralized and decentralized?
Fundamentally, I think the difference is the centralized players are These large Silicon Valley tech companies, whereas the decentralized players are more open source innovation, open source technology where the model parameters, the data, etc. is freely available to builders to access and specifically what BitTor does, an analogy I like to use is what the internet did opening access for information.
Bit Tensors like the World Wide Web of opening access to intelligence across all these different projects.
Yes, and when we're looking at crypto sectors, there are many silos, as you just mentioned.
So when it comes to decentralized AI, give us an idea of what this means, especially for the underpinnings of the digital asset space.
There's projects building across a variety of different sectors, so we've got prediction markets, data, distributed training, for example, there are projects within our portfolio in the computer vision space that are doing computer vision models at 200 times more efficient than their centralized competitors because they're leveraging open source innovation.
There's agent platforms hitting software engineering benchmarks at the state of the art level in a much faster time frame compared to centralized players.
Another example would be the open claw, right?
I mean 82 days from inception to this fully functioning project, and that's what open source is continuing to see.
It's what we're seeing in the Bittensor ecosystem as well.
And you brought up a lot of important points and we're still watching to see what the implications. for artificial intelligence when it comes to industries for listed companies here at the New York Stock Exchange, for example, but you mentioned ethos at the top of our interview.
So what does this mean in terms of innovation and what do you see going from here?
When I say religious ethos, I mean it's kind of like what Bitcoin did, right?
It was this global decentralized non-sovereign hard cap supply alternative form of store value.
Bittensor is similar.
It was designed in mirror of Bitcoin, so 21 million tokens, four-year halving cycle.
It didn't have large venture capital backers.
You had to produce work to get on the network to start earning the token-based incentives.
And so there is a more libertarian ethos similar to Bitcoin as to the builders coming into the decentralized AI space.
I think resonates with a lot of people.
Yes, and speaking of resonating with a lot of people, what would you say are the real world applications because this is a very dense topic, something that we could spend a one hour podcast talking about.
Yes, no, it can get complex when you bring in crypto incentives into this, but fundamentally, like at the end of the day, what this is is a subnet or a builder will create a competition.
The miners will produce the work, so they'll provide compute, compete to provide some sort of AI output, and the validators are like your judge, if you will, verifying that the outputs are correct and scoring them and allocating incentives accordingly, and the token is kind of the economic engine powering all these market participants coming together to produce value.
And Evan, finally, before I let you go, we are kicking off a new year and we've seen volatility across all asset classes.
But when it comes to some of the changes, some of the work that you're looking at amongst the stakeholders in this space, what does it mean not just looking into the rest of this year, but also beyond for your space?
I think what this year is going to be for the BitSensor community as well as the broader decentralized AI community is we're just going to see really rapid progression on new innovations and new benchmarks being hit.
We're going to continue to see creative product development that couldn't have otherwise been created in a centralized manner.
Leveraging this construct, outsourcing teams to a global network of miners and producers of intelligence is very fascinating and exciting to us.
And finally, before I let you go, we're fast approaching the opening bell here at the New York Stock Exchange, but when it comes to that intersection between Trad and D, what do you expect to see as we move forward?
I think we're just going to continue to see more and more trad 5 rails coming into the crypto ecosystem and we were seeing Larry Fink talking about tokenization.
I remember years ago when I first started off in crypto, we were talking about tokenizing a hotel and now BlackRock is talking about transforming everything onto tokenized rails, so I think.
It's just a matter of time before this technology continues to creep into all aspects of Tradify, and there won't be really DeFi and Tradfi.
It will all become finance.
Evan, I appreciate your time.
Thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for simplifying a very dense and complicated topic.
Thanks for having me, pleasure.
