The intersection of crypto and AI is "spawning papers, products, blog posts and companies," according to a new study, but all the buzz and hype "obscures what exactly has been done."
So nearly two dozen researchers from Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton and others have teamed to prepare what they describe as "comprehensive research" on how these two disruptive technologies might be used in tandem.
The team on Monday publicized a 127-page paper covering topics including "AI-enhanced smart-contract security," "decentralized agent-centric payment rails" and "DAOs for AI development." (DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization, a company-like structure common to many blockchain projects.)
The effort might show that researchers are beginning to formalize the study of decentralized AI as its own distinct discipline, as opposed to just a subset of crypto or AI.
"Our goal with this survey was to highlight and summarize what we currently know, and perhaps more importantly, surface gaps that the research and practice communities can address,” Giulia Fanti, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon who served as the the survey’s co-editor, said in an accompanying press release shared with DeAI News.
Ari Juels, a Cornell Tech professor and co-editor, said that "combining the two naively can be like soldering Jell-O."
The authors of the paper, dated May 9, worked together under the auspices of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts, a research consortium based at Cornell Tech in New York, according to the press release.
As part of the project, students of Juels' created a chatbot that allows users to query the full research report with natural-language prompts and questions.
DeAI News took the chatbot for a spin:
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to handle press-release rewrites. I then used Distro Publisher, our MCP server, to file a draft directly to DeAI News, and used the DistroVerse editing interface to do a thorough rewrite, and I personally checked all the facts prior to publication.)