Decentralized AI: The future of intelligence development and the visionary Rahul Arulkumaran leading the charge

There has been a massive AI boom over the past couple of years, which was propelled by the advent of ChatGPT. A plethora of centralized companies started building large-scale AI models but this also caused some concerns around the power being concentrated in the hands of a few organizations and people started looking for alternatives, while advocating for safe & responsible AI development. Around the same time, there was another industry that was gaining a tremendous amount of traction – Decentralized AI. The world of Decentralized AI is a rapidly growing field which deals with the intersection of Blockchain and AI, 2 of the fastest growing technologies of the 21st century. This industry is worth over 50 Billion USD and is projected to grow exponentially in the years to come.
There are not many AI leaders that understand this industry because of how nascent and complicated it is. However, with over 6 years of experience in the AI industry and over 4 years of experience in the blockchain industry, Rahul Arulkumaran is one of the more experienced individuals in this space whose Blockchain and AI expertise make him a thought leader in this space.
Rahul currently works as an AI/ML Engineering Fellow at Foundry Digital, which owns the world’s largest Bitcoin Mining pool in the world and is also one of the largest institutional partners in the Decentralized AI space. Foundry is also a core contributor and infrastructure provider to various Decentralized AI projects like Bittensor, Akash, FLock and Hyperbolic among others. Rahul’s primary focus is on building AI powered technologies on Bittensor, while also contributing to the other decentralized AI projects.
With a core focus on AI & software development, Rahul leads various operations like building subnets and mining for Foundry in the Bittensor realm. The reason Decentralized AI is a powerful alternative to centralized AI is because the risk of creating general purpose AI is split across multiple parties, it’s cost effective and most importantly, contributors to Decentralized AI blockchains are also incentivized for their contributions.
According to Rahul, “Decentralized AI is powering the next AI revolution where the power of AI development is in the hands of the people and not centralized. The core ethos of Blockchain technology is to incentivize people for their contributions and blockchains like Bittensor allow people to contribute intelligence models for various topics, where the topic creators who are called subnet owners then decide how they want to reward people for their contributions programmatically. This creates a healthy and competitive environment where people are truly incentivized for the efforts they put into building AI models.”
While Rahul has worked on multiple projects in the Decentralized AI space, one of the core projects that he has led and worked on at Foundry is the S&P 500 subnet on Bittensor. This subnet is a trading subnet that encourages and incentivizes AI model developers (miners), to contribute state of the art time series models to predict the price of the S&P 500 at 5-minute intervals for the next 30-minutes. There are over 230 AI developers that contribute models to accurately predict the price of the S&P 500 and share a total reward pool of over 8 Million USD annually for building such models, which has resulted in the subnet seeing AI models that exceed various open research benchmarks.
One such benchmark is the directional accuracy of the S&P 500. Various research papers with over a 1000 citations have achieved about 60% accuracy when it comes to predicting directional movement of the index, however, the subnet on Bittensor by Foundry exceeds this benchmark where model providers are consistently beating the research benchmarks. This is however possible only because Rahul and his team have optimized the incentive structure in such a way that the AI developers need to provide robust predictive models that surpass these benchmarks.
Rahul has been an ardent advocate of Bittensor and the larger Decentralized AI space. He actively mentors students and conducts webinars to promote the space and get more people into this ecosystem. He says, “Talent in this ecosystem is in a developing stage. There are thousands of people who are interested, but not everyone is equipped with the tools to dive into this space.” He spends a lot of his time mentoring people and to date, has mentored over 200 people, helping them break into this space.
The Decentralized AI space is heating up with various high-profile VCs dedicating the majority of their funds to invest in companies building in this space. The reason this space is appealing for people is because the results that these companies can provide far exceeds those that centralized AI companies can achieve, primarily because the job to build robust AI models is distributed and decentralized. Another reason that this space is exciting for a lot of people is because people receive monetary rewards for their contributions. While the space is currently valued at 50 Billion USD, the value of this space is expected to grow tenfold to 500 Billion USD over the next 3 years, and it is people like Rahul that help propel the growth of such domains.
First Published: 24 April, 2023