We are excited to announce that we are leading a $15 million seed round in Poseidon. Incubated by @StoryProtocol, Poseidon aims to build a decentralized data layer to coordinate the supply and demand of AI training data.
The training data for the first generation of AI foundational models was seemingly infinite. Today, the most accessible sources, such as books and websites, have largely dried up, and data has become a limiting factor in AI development.
Much of the data that remains today is either low quality or inaccessible due to intellectual property protections. For some of the most promising AI applications—robotics, self-driving cars, and spatial intelligence—this data doesn’t even exist yet. Now, these systems require entirely new types of information: multisensory, rich edge case information, and information captured in nature. Where will all this physical world data come from?
The challenge is not just technical, but also one of coordination. Thousands of contributors must work together in a distributed way to acquire, label, and maintain the physical data needed for the next generation of AI. We believe that no centralized approach can effectively coordinate the creation and curation of the data required to meet the scale and diversity required. A decentralized approach can solve this problem.
@psdnai allows vendors to collect the data AI companies need while keeping the IP secure through Story’s programmable IP license. The move aims to build a new economic foundation for the internet where data creators are fairly compensated for helping AI companies drive the next generation of intelligent systems.
Poseidon’s team is led by Chief Scientist and Co-Founder @SPChinchali with deep expertise in AI infrastructure. Sandeep is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in AI, Robotics, and Distributed Systems and holds a PhD in AI and Distributed Systems from Stanford University. Head of Product and Co-Founder @sarickshah has a decade of experience as a machine learning engineer. Scaling AI products for large enterprises such as financial services, telecom, etc.
