It began with a tumultuous workspace: a desk overwhelmed by noise in a lab at Northumbria University, where Ben Fielding was entrenched in his PhD journey back in 2015. Fielding, surrounded by a cacophony of GPU-powered machines, dreamt of a more collaborative approach to AI development, which he coined as ‘swarms.’ However, the limitations of his setup, in stark contrast to the vast resources of giants like Google, were a constant reminder of the challenges ahead.

Fielding recalls, “Google was doing this research as well… They had thousands [of GPUs] in a data center.” This drove him to consider decentralized AI to overcome such constraints. In 2020, he co-founded Gensyn to provide decentralized computing solutions before the concept gained mainstream traction.

Recently, Gensyn launched its ‘RL Swarms’ protocol, allowing AI models to learn from one another within a peer-to-peer network. Fielding explains, “What if they can talk to other models and critique each other’s thinking?” The integration of blockchain is next, enhancing trust between models and providing a decentralized ledger where identities can be verified.

Looking to the future, Fielding aims to democratize access to machine learning resources, emphasizing, “People should have the right to build machine learning technologies”.

This interview has been condensed for clarity.