Blockchain, AI and Quantum Computing: Exploring the Synergy and Future Opportunities Amid Infrastructure Challenges

- “Do you have data that’s well balanced? It is huge concern”

- How do you turn a non-profit into a for-profit with open AI?

- “The demand projections are exponential. Over the last 15 years, energy management has grown 81% here, and now we’re talking about 500%”

The evolution and implications of decentralized AI and generative models, the challenges of data privacy and bias, and the exponential energy consumption of training models were the key themes of the discussion that featured eminent thinkers in the space.

Dr. Leemon Baird, inventor of the hashgraph distributed consensus algorithm and Co-Founder of Hedera, highlighted issues surrounding how AI data is collected.

“So these AI systems learn from text and images that are out there. They just go through it many times,” he said. This then brings up issues on copyright, could the data used be biased or even racist.

“Do you have data that’s well balanced? It is a huge concern. And so the entire industry right now is struggling with this,” Baird added.

For Olivier Roussy Newton, Chairman and CEO of BTQ, the most interesting aspect is how models can be decentralized, with attention on how to turn a non-profit into a profit-seeking enterprise with open AI.

“In the last year, the open source models really caught up with a lot of productive models, so now you could run llama 3.3 on your own hardware, right? So it’s opened up this AI compute game to all of the data centers and others,” he said.

Kerri Langlais, Chief Strategy Officer for TeraWulf Inc, highlighted her company’s role in building the digital infrastructure that actually powers and models.

“Demand projections are exponential. Over the last 15 years, energy management has grown 81% here, and now we’re talking about 500%,” she noted.

Geography also comes into play, she said, adding that while data centers tended to be located near population centers, that has now shifted to places further away. She noted too that a lot of lessons were learned from Bitcoin mining.

“Co-locating at a large base load, renewable energy like nuclear, makes a lot of sense,” Langlais added.

The panel, led by David Johnston, Open Source Contributor at Morpheus, also touched on the future of quantum computing and its integration with AI and blockchain technologies. Dominic Williams, founder of the Internet Computer (ICP) blockchain project and President and Chief Scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, talked about risks associated with AI.

One aspect is how confidential data is processed while “another concern is that it will be encrypted with the infrastructure of the encrypted ransomware.”

“I think a lot of people are going to prioritize security and recipients over inference costs, because inference costs aren’t that great anyway. So that’s one big opportunity we’re pursuing, and there are already lots of models running on the internet,” he said.