Democratizing access to AI development: Partnering with Prime Intellect
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.
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Einar Braathen is a Partner at CoinFund and a leader on our Executive Team, with a focus on early stage venture investments, particularly Infrastructure, DeFi and AI.
Prior to joining CoinFund, he spent time as an investor at Accel in London and General Catalyst. Originally from Norway, he is currently based in Boston and invests across all geographies.
Einar holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, and a Master in Management from London Business School.
