Decentralized AI Platform Gives Power Back to Users
In the modern internet, big tech companies own virtually all our online data and get to decide what to do with it. But a new platform, Vana, is on a mission to give power back to the users. Vana allows individuals to upload their data and govern how it’s used, giving them a stake in the AI systems that will increasingly shape our society.
From Economics to the Blockchain
Vana co-founder Anna Kazlauskas ’19 had a picture of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on her bedroom wall. She came to MIT sure she’d become an economist, but she ended up being one of five students to join the MIT Bitcoin club in 2015. This experience led her into the world of blockchains and cryptocurrency.
Kazlauskas met Art Abal, who was then attending Harvard University, in a former Media Lab class Emergent Ventures. They decided to work on new ways to obtain data to train AI systems.
A New Approach
The founders’ approach evolved over the years and was informed by Kazlauskas’ experience working at the financial blockchain company Celo after graduation. But Kazlauskas credits her time at MIT with helping her think about these problems, and the instructor for Emergent Ventures, Ramesh Raskar, still helps Vana think about AI research questions today.
Vana takes advantage of a little-known law that allows users of most big tech platforms to export their data directly. Users can upload that information into encrypted digital wallets in Vana and disburse it to train models as they see fit.
Crowdsourced, User-Owned AI
Last year, a machine-learning engineer proposed using Vana user data to train an AI model that could generate Reddit posts. More than 140,000 Vana users contributed their Reddit data, which contained posts, comments, messages, and more. Users decided on the terms in which the model could be used, and they maintained ownership of the model after it was created.
Vana has enabled similar initiatives with user-contributed data from the social media platform X; sleep data from sources like Oura rings; and more. There are also collaborations that combine data pools to create broader AI applications.
Data DAOs
Data can also be used to create personalized AI models and agents. In Vana, data are used in a way that preserves user privacy because the system doesn’t expose identifiable information. Once the model is created, users maintain ownership so that every time it’s used, they’re rewarded proportionally based on how much their data helped train it.
Conclusion
Vana has over 1 million users and over 20 live data DAOs. More than 300 additional data pools have been proposed by users on Vana’s system, and Kazlauskas says many will go into production this year. Vana’s decentralized approach allows users to benefit from the rise of AI while maintaining control over their data. It’s a win-win: users get to benefit from the rise of AI because they own the models, and the technology improves without a single company controlling an all-powerful AI model.
