[HanClinto]

Trigger warning: very stupid question to follow.

To my smooth-brain naiveté, this feels like the sort of thing that we could reward with some sort of cryptocurrency in a blockchain? It's difficult to achieve gains, but it's relatively quick to independently verify (5 minute training runs).

I know "blockchain all the things" is sooooo 8 years ago, but I'm looking at the descending graph of progress here, and wondering if being able to claim improvement tokens (even for no reason other than NFT-esque bragging rights) wouldn't be a cool thing here?

I'm asking this as someone who knows next to nothing about crypto or blockchain or any of those things, but mainly thinking of trying to gamify assigning GPU rigs to "mining" these measurable improvements.

[gavinray]

I had this idea in 2019 -- "p2p machine learning" with some sort of incentive.

It makes a lot of sense to incentivize contributing. My idea was that you could earn "credits" for participating, which you could exchange for compute resources from the "swarm" later, on any given problem (training, local inference, etc).

[austinbaggio]

I worked on building blockchains for about 4 years, and this is not a stupid question at all. The verification problem is real. A 5-minute training run produces an objective val_bpb score that anyone can reproduce from the published source code. And this is actually valuable work, unlike most proof of work chain workloads.

The practical challenge is that adding a blockchain means agents also need to participate in consensus, store and sync the ledger, and run the rest of the network infrastructure on top of the actual research. So it needs a unit economic analysis. That said, all results already include full source code and deterministic metrics, so the hard part of verifiable compute is already solved. You could take this further with a zkVM to generate cryptographic proofs that the code produced the claimed score, so nobody needs to re-run anything to verify. Verification becomes checking a proof, not reproducing the compute.

Compute-credits are interesting. Contribute GPU time now, draw on the swarm later for training, inference, whatever you need. That's a real utility token with intrinsic value tied to actual compute, not speculation.

[HanClinto]

> The verification problem is real. A 5-minute training run produces an objective val_bpb score that anyone can reproduce from the published source code. And this is actually valuable work, unlike most proof of work chain workloads.

Yes, thank you for the validation! That was the core of what sparked this for me -- my cartoon drawing of blockchain is that it's dependent on problems that are difficult to solve (improve this codebase), but easy to verify (loss went down).

Like you noted, this is also cool in that it's valuable work (unlike most of these workloads)

I appreciate the opportunities for optimization you've laid out (such as zkVM) but it feels like that would be optional compared to the basic thing here?

And yeah -- what one _does_ with the crypto-credits is pretty open-ended. Like you said, drawing on the swarm for training or inference or whatever you need -- it feels like the sort of thing that one could use as a GPU battery of sorts. Most of my personal GPU work goes in bursts -- but most of the time my GPU is sitting idle.

Most of the other GPU share-cropping sorts of ideas I've seen floating around lack the ability to independently prove that work was done. Having a global metric for a shared target like this seems to solve what has been lacking in a lot of other distributed systems I've seen.

Looking at the graph on the website, it looks like it's already got a bit of a scoreboard and independent verification / validation of results. Feels like it would be a relatively small jump to crowdsource this and put it into a formal blockchain.

But the next natural question is: Would we stand to gain anything by adding blockchain to this?