A venture capital giant is reportedly investing tens of millions of dollars into a Solana (SOL)-based decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) project.

Venture capital firm Paradigm is investing close to $50 million into AI startup Nous Research, a firm that specializes in human-centric language models and AI research, bringing its token valuation up to $1 billion, reports Fortune.

According to Fortune, Nous Research plans to utilize artificial intelligence to train its open-source language models as a means of eventually competing with top AI firms, such as OpenAI and DeepSeek.

However, one difference in the firm’s approach compared to the traditional one is that Nous wants to train AI models in a decentralized manner, using spare computing capacity from around the globe, rather than train their models in a central data center.

Nous Research co-founder Karan Malhotra told Fortune that he, in collaboration with a former member of OpenAI’s founding team, created a method that would allow for the training of AI models in such a way.

As stated by Malhotra to Fortune,

“We think of the incentive mechanism behind crypto to push people to actually utilize their idle compute [of] less as a donation but more as a transaction…

We don’t want to get kind of bogged down by the traditional view of how crypto operates when we’re a very serious research lab and an academic lab. This is really the only way in which we can make such a massive training run and such a democratic thing possible.”

Though Nous has chosen to build on top of the smart contract platform, no timeline was given as to when the AI training product will go live. The firm is still deciding whether or not to give out rewards in SOL.

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