Democratizing access to AI development: Partnering with Prime Intellect

Einar Braathen

·

Follow

Published in

The CoinFund Blog

·

5 min read

·

16 hours ago

—

We are excited to announce that CoinFund has co-led a $5.5 million dollar round in Prime Intellect, a company aggregating GPU supply and enabling collective ownership of AI models.

As the AI industry has continued developing at a riveting pace, demand for GPU and expenditure on training models has grown with it. AI Training Infrastructure is estimated to be a $475B industry by 2032 (Bloomberg) and Nvidia recently crossed the $2T market cap barrier (WSJ). Given the supply restrictions from a single chip supplier, high-end GPU compute has become a scarce resource. Outside of a handful of large companies that sit on their own GPU hardware, we have seen a fragmented landscape of both centralized and decentralized suppliers emerge, making it hard to navigate what limited supply exists.

These dynamics have given fuel to a wider debate around the land grab of compute power and ultimately of ownership of large AI models. While closed source was believed to be the only way at first, open source AI is increasingly becoming a viable alternative. Recent developments like LLaMA 400B+ have put open source models on pace to beat GPT-4 soon (link).

However, what is clear is that both closed and open sourced efforts are still driven mostly by large tech companies today. The open source community faces a number of hurdles to coordinate their development efforts and train models. Overcoming these are important, because decisions made today as an industry determine someone’s right to build, own and access in the future. If the internet is about accessibility, it is critical to continue this path and reach a state where access to GPUs is a given.

To this effect, the vision behind Prime Intellect is incredibly ambitious and compelling: to allow AI developers to list and tokenize their models for collective ownership and collaboration, in a fully scalable and interoperable manner. This will open up new business models and ways to benefit model contributors, as well as attracting capital, data and compute.

The first step is to aggregate GPU supply from leading providers, to increase access and reduce cost for developers. Furthermore, the team is working on a distributed training framework across multiple clusters, which would significantly improve utilization and further reduce both cost and speed for training. This will put us on the path to tokenized compute, making it an interoperable commodity. The protocol offers the infrastructure for truly decentralized AI development, and over time it will enable collective ownership and governance for both independent and large models. Please check out their beta and join the community here, if you are interested in becoming an early adopter.

Prime Intellect co-founders Vincent Weisser and Johannes Hagemann offer an unusual and deep combination of AI and web3 experience. Vincent helped start VitaDAO, the leading organization in decentralized science, before leading product and AI at Molecule, the platform for biopharma IP. Johannes built and scaled distributed training frameworks from scratch at Aleph Alpha, and received a Best Paper Award for his recent work at NeurIPS 2023. Since we first met the team, we have continuously been blown away by their vision, expertise and ability to execute.

We’re thrilled to support Prime Intellect on their journey to build the open future of AI! They lead the way with other CoinFund AI trailblazers like Gensyn, Worldcoin, Giza, Sindri and Bagel. For further context on our view on decentralized AI, check out our 2022 Web3 AI overview here.

* * *

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the individual CoinFund Management LLC (“CoinFund”) personnel quoted and are not the views of CoinFund or its affiliates. Certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources, which may include portfolio companies of funds managed by CoinFund. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, CoinFund has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.

This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by CoinFund. An offer to invest in a CoinFund fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by CoinFund, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by CoinFund (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for CoinFund to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://www.coinfund.io/portfolio.

Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. This presentation contains “forward-looking statements,” which can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “may”, “will”, “should”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “project”, “estimate”, “intend”, “continue” or “believe” or the negatives thereof or other variations thereon or comparable terminology. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events or results may differ materially and adversely from those reflected or contemplated in the forward-looking statements.