Enterprise capital heavyweight a16z Crypto led a $15 million seed-round funding into Poseidon, a decentralized synthetic intelligence (AI) knowledge layer.
Poseidon is constructed to supply entry to coaching knowledge for robotics and AI fashions that’s “traceable, enforceable and monetizable,” based on an emailed announcement on Tuesday.
The challenge was incubated by mental property (IP)-based protocol Story, one other a16z portfolio firm. Story goals to transform IP into programmable belongings that may be licensed and managed utilizing sensible contracts on blockchains.
“AI basis fashions have already exhausted essentially the most simply accessible coaching knowledge,” a16z Crypto’s managing companion, Chris Dixon, mentioned within the e-mail.
“Poseidon’s decentralized knowledge layer seeks to determine a brand new financial basis for the web, rewarding creators and suppliers for offering the various inputs that next-gen clever methods want.”
AI fashions, particularly generative AI, are educated on huge datasets — typically scraped from the web — which embody copyrighted works similar to books, artwork, music and code. Some creatives argue that this constitutes unauthorized use and copyright infringement as a result of their work is getting used for business functions with out permission or compensation. The observe has already led to a number of lawsuits.
This friction highlights how AI and blockchain expertise can work together, with decentralization serving to to supply safe, managed sharing of knowledge and permitting a number of events to contribute to large-language mannequin coaching with out compromising privateness or proprietary data.
The creation of numerous datasets opens up prospects for knowledge monetization, with creators being compensated for using their works.

