Exclusive: Pluralis raises $7.6 million from prominent investors to take on OpenAI with big decentralized models
Summary
Thats what Pluralis Research thinks, and its one of a handful of startups that believes blockchainsessentially decentralized cloud computing networks akin to Amazon Web Servicesmay be the answer.On Wednesday, Pluralis announced that it had secured $7.6 million in pre-seed and seed funding, led by the venture capital firms CoinFund and Union Square Ventures. Topology, Variant, Eden Block, and Bodhi Ventures also participated in the round, along with prominent crypto investor Balaji Srinivasan and Clem Delangue, cofounder of the popular AI platform HuggingFace.The raise was for equity, with a warrant for future cryptocurrencyif Pluralis decides to launch one, Alexander Long, founder and CEO, told Fortune.For now Pluralis doesnt have a product, meaning investors are primarily betting on Long and the veteran team of AI researchers hes assembled. We think we can do it.The Pluralis founder has a doctorate in computer science and worked at Amazon for more than three years as an AI engineer. Hes assembled seven other computer scientists, all with doctorates or stints as postdoctoral researchers, to see if its possible to build powerful AI algorithms through a decentralized network of servers.Currently, top-flight AI requires fleets of expensive computers in a warehouse working together to train massive algorithms. Researchers estimated that it took 1,300 megawatt hours of energy, or about as much electricity consumed by 130 U.S. homes in a year, to produce an earlier version of OpenAIs GPT model, or algorithm.