Quick take:
- The company says its “verifiable oracle protocol” is used by developers to build end-to-end trustless and decentralised apps powered by AI.
- The company also offers a product called “initial model offering,” or IMO, which enables ownership of open-source AI models through tokenisation.
- Ora said it is using zero-knowledge technology to provide secure and efficient on-chain machine learning with privacy-preserving features.
Ora Protocol, the On-chain AI oracle looking to integrate AI with decentralised applications has raised $20 million in a round backed by Polychain Capital, HFO, HashKey Capital, and SevenX Ventures.
The company said it will use the fresh capital to accelerate the development of its technology and infrastructure for tokenising AI models. Ora offers a product called “initial model offering,” or IMO, which enables ownership of open-source AI models through tokenisation.
The company describes itself as a “verifiable oracle protocol”, which developers can use to build end-to-end trustless and decentralised apps powered by AI.
According to the product documentation, ORA’s On-chain AI oracle breaks down the limitations of smart contracts by offering AI inference, so developers can innovate freely.
Launched in 2022, some of the early adopters of the product include Compound, Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap, Optimism, and Arbitrum, among others.
The product currently supports LlaMA 2 (7B) and Stable Diffusion, which allow users to build their own AI oracle that is programmable, permissionless, and censorship-resistant.
According to ORA, its product development is driven by the need to address the challenge of monetising AI model contributions.
“Many open-sourced AI models face the challenge of monetising their contributions, leading to a lack of motivation for contributors and organizations alike. As a result, the AI industry is currently led by closed-source, for-profit companies,” the documentation states. This drives the current products to raise more funding to build in public.
“With IMO, we can win the fight for open-source AI. IMO can enable the sustainability of the open-source AI model’s ecosystem by fostering long-term benefits and encouraging engagement and funding to the open-source AI community.”
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