- Space and Time Head of Marketing Catherine Daly delves into the platform’s AI interests.
- Daly tips Space and Time to bring verifiability to AI with Blockchain.
- Beyond AI, Space and Time’s data warehouse promises to enable developers to create more intuitive DApps tailored to their user base.
With the rise of AI and blockchain technology, there’s growing interest in whether and how these two sectors can intersect. While many believe that promising applications exist, explorers of these initiatives face a key challenge recently highlighted by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin: the incompatibility of crypto’s open-source nature with AI’s closed or ‘black box’ model.
However, it is in this incompatibility that fast-rising data-focused crypto startup Space and Time sees an opportunity, according to Catherine Daly, the firm’s marketing chief. In an exclusive interview with DailyCoin Journalist David Okoya, Daly spoke about how Space and Time intends to bring verifiability to AI, allowing users to prove and trust the data used to train these models while maintaining the privacy and security of the data.
Can Space and Time securely unlock transparency for AI?
“The Perfect Fit”
Daly’s disclosure on Space and Time’s AI plans came when asked about promising intersections between blockchain and AI. She tipped blockchain as “the perfect fit” to bring verifiability to AI. According to the Space and Time marketing chief, this is something that the startup is actively pursuing.
"Space and Time is specifically verifying the data being fed into these AI models for training, so both verifying that an AI model was trained on the correct data and that that data was not tampered with during the training process and that sanitizing out copyrighted IP," she detailed.
Daly’s statements come amid growing trust, accountability, and copyright infringement concerns around AI models. In December 2023, the New York Times sued Open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, accusing them of training their models with their articles without their consent.
At the core of Space and Time’s model to bring a level of transparency to AI is its decentralized data warehouse solution for aggregating data, similar to Google’s BigQuery and its zero-knowledge SQL proving technology. This combination, Daly explained, allows Space and Time to handle the large amount of data typically required to train AI models and confirm the veracity of the data.
"Space and Time has this enterprise-scale data warehouse that can handle that amount of data, ZK circuit running on top of it to be able to prove the Integrity of that data. It's a really interesting use case for us."
According to Daly, Space and Time is working closely with Microsoft and its AI Lab to realize the implementation of this verifiability solution. She added that development was already in its “early stages.”
Beyond this AI intersection, Daly contended that Space and Time’s data warehouse promises to revolutionize data handling in the Web3 space.
Empowering Projects to Create a More Streamlined Experience
When asked about the hurdles facing Web3 sectors like gaming, Daly described data handling as “one of the biggest hurdles” facing the industry.
"I think one of the biggest hurdles for Web3 gaming and really just Web3 in general is handling data. Web3 games, specifically by nature, generate a lot of data off-chain unless it's a fully on-chain game. They're running centralized gaming servers dealing with where a player moves in the game and what's happening and all of this data that's far too big and expensive to live on-chain."
According to the Space and Time marketing chief, however, this data handling hurdle is one that the firm is positioned to help the industry overcome. She touts the data warehouse’s ability to index on-chain and off-chain data, allowing developers to source data and glean insights in real-time.
“Space and Time is able to make all of that index blockchain data available to the game. So a game knows what’s going on whether its on-chain NFTs, or its on-chain rewards, or what its players are doing on-chain as well as the off-chain data streamed in from the game.”
Using the insight gleaned from Space and Time, Daly tipped developers to be able to create more streamlined experiences for users driven by data.
"Instead of just saying okay in-my game, if you win this round, you get an NFT, or if you're player number one, two, three in the rankings, you get an NFT. You can say if your shot accuracy improved by 20% and you had two hours of playtime, and you own this token, then you get an NFT. Just more data-driven insights for developers to use for analytics and launching rewards."
Beyond improving native Web3 applications, Daly contended that Space and Time’s data warehouse was likely to play a key role in institutional adoption, tipping it as “a familiar toolset” for enterprises seeking to understand the habits of their customers on-chain.
In recent months, Space and Time has grabbed headlines for all the right reasons. In October 2023, prominent blockchain oracle provider Chainlink named Space and Time its preferred data warehouse. The platform followed this up last week with a zkSync partnership announcement, detailing that it will join the network’s hyperchain ecosystem and serve as its data warehouse layer.
On the Flipside
- Space and Time’s verifiable AI solution is still in its early stages of development.
- Space and Time has only indexed about 11 popular blockchains.
Why This Matters
Amid growing trust, accountability, and copyright infringement concerns, Space and Time’s solution promises to bring transparency to AI using blockchain and ZK technology without compromising the security of the models.
Read this for more on how Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin sees crypto and AI intersecting:
Here’s How Ethereum’s Buterin Sees AI, Crypto Intersecting
See how global crypto funds fared last week:
Crypto Funds Hit Record $1B Weekly Outflows on BTC Price Scare