Effect.AI—An Open, Democratic and Decentralized Network for Artificial Intelligence

What, in a nutshell, is Effect.ai?

Effect.AI is a Dutch project founded in 2017 with the aim to decentralize AI development. The goal of the company is to make AI development accessible and affordable to everyone. This is done by the creation of The Effect Network.

Wait, does that sound complicated? It’s not really. The Effect Network is made up of three phases, which I will explain in further detail later on in this post. The Effect network incentivizes people to collaborate together in the development of AI, on a global level. It is built on blockchain technology. The network’s three phases-essentially decentralized apps, (dApps) are overlapping. They are called Effect Force, Effect Smart Market, and Effect Power. Developers can use these dApps to utilize a global workforce on demand, access or monetize AI services, or rent/lease computational power. The entire Effect Network is powered by the EFX utility token.

You might be wondering why we need The Effect Network. Currently, there is a monopoly on AI by big companies and tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and IBM, just to name a few. They keep the technology centralized, behind their closed doors, so they can profit as much as they want from smaller companies and consumers. If you don’t have much competition, why keep prices low? With the creation of The Effect Network, smaller companies and the average developer can access the tools needed for AI development, exchange, and the power to run the AI algorithms. This is all done peer to peer, eliminating the current need of the aforementioned companies.

Most simply put, here is a scenario: John Q. Public can upload data to Effect Force. A global workforce of people will annotate, sort, or label the data as instructed by John Q. Public. Now, John Q. Public has the structured data he needs to train his AI algorithm. With his newly trained algorithm, John Q. Public can use Effect Smart Market to either give his algorithm away for free, sell it outright, or lease its use to other people and companies. This is sort of like the app store for cell phones. John Q. Public also has a large amount of CPU that he doesn’t need for his own computational needs. Rather than let it sit unused, he leases access time on it with Effect Smart Power. Now, people who have paid to use his algorithm are also paying him for CPU time to run it.

The founders of Effect.ai believe in tech for good—technology that supports transparency, equality, and opportunity for people and organizations around the world. They started The Effect Foundation to start Effect Social Impact hubs in developing nations all over the world. The Effect Foundation is about inclusion for all, that no matter how disadvantaged a community is, its people will have the opportunities to take part and succeed with AI technology. AI has the potential to change the world for the better.

To learn more, I urge you to visit their website http://effect.ai. For more information on the microtask platform, Effect Force visit http://force.effect.ai

Footnotes

[1] http://effect.ai