Investing in Gensyn
The recent advancements in AI are incredible and have the power to save the world. But building AI systems requires ever-larger deployments of computational power for the training and inference of today’s largest and most powerful models. This means big technology companies have an advantage over startups in the race to capture value from AI, thanks to privileged access to computing power and the economies of scale of large data centers. In order to compete on a level playing field, startups will need affordable access to large-scale computing power of their own.
We have always described blockchains as a new kind of computer. What makes them unique is that developers can write code making strong commitments about how that code will behave in the future. This permissionless component of blockchains enables the creation of a marketplace for buyers and sellers of compute power — or any other kind of digital resource like data or algorithms — to trade with no middlemen on a global scale.
Enter Gensyn, a blockchain-based marketplace protocol connecting developers (anyone who is able to train a machine learning model) with solvers (anyone who wants to train a machine learning model). By tapping into the long tail of idle, machine-learning-capable compute around the world — such as in smaller data centers, personal gaming computers, M1 and M2 Macs, and eventually even smartphones — Gensyn can potentially 10-100x the available compute power for machine learning.
The founders of Gensyn are Harry Grieve and Ben Fielding. We’ve had the privilege to get to know Ben and Harry over the past few years, and nobody better combines the knowledge and cultural understanding of both the AI and crypto cypherpunk world. We’re impressed with their ambition and the scale of their vision, and believe in their ability to execute on it.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re leading Gensyn’s Series A. We’re looking forward to partnering with them on their mission to make infrastructure for AI much more widely accessible.
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