The Digital Currency Group (DCG) announced on Wednesday the establishment of a new subsidiary called Yuma to support and promote the development of the decentralized AI network Bittensor.
Bittensor is a decentralized open network where anyone can build, train, and use AI. According to the press release, the name Yuma comes from the core technical innovation of Bittensor, the "Yuma Consensus," a consensus mechanism that can fairly and accurately measure and reward contributions to the network through its native token $TAO.
Yuma is led by DCG founder and CEO Barry Silbert and will provide the funding, infrastructure, and technical resources needed for startups and enterprises to explore and build on Bittensor. The company stated, "As a key bet by DCG on the convergence of crypto and AI, this decentralized AI category presents tremendous growth opportunities within the broader AI space."
"Just as Bit early on drove the development of a new, transparent, and borderless form of money, we are now moving from digital ownership of assets to decentralized ownership of intelligence," Silbert said. "By supporting projects that drive decentralized intelligence and change the world, Yuma will shift the transformative power of AI and machine learning from centralized companies to open resources accessible to all."
Within the Bittensor ecosystem, projects built on the network are called subnets, each a market focused on a specific AI/ML service (e.g., text generation, translation, and data storage). Miners on Bittensor contribute computing power to these subnets, and validators evaluate the quality of contributions and allocate rewards. Yuma is participating in the Bittensor network in various roles, including establishing and launching subnets, as the third-largest validator, and currently mining on four subnets.
"We created Bittensor to provide a competitive alternative to a top-down restricted world of high-performance AI capabilities, advocating for the liberation of the use of open technology from traditional gatekeepers, to ensure the next generation of visionaries shaping our world can access the AI revolution," said Bittensor co-founder Jacob Steeves.
