Bulgarian ScyNet Gets €250K Funding from Telelink to Train Virtual Decision Makers
Unlike the well-known similar named project in the Terminator movie, this one is not aimed to help machines to take over humanity. ScyNet indeed is aimed to be a transparent open-source platform for the development of artificial intelligence products. The project has just received €250K funding from Bulgarian digital company Telelink. The funding has been provided as a prize of the Startup Pitch contest during the blockchain conference CEE Block. The exact conditions of the deal have not been revealed.
“More or less there is an agreement that the blockchain technology will be getting more and more relevant in both the private and the public space in the years to come. Telelink pinpointed three key areas to invest in – supply chain, education, and healthcare. We chose to invest in this company (Comrade Cooperative that stands behind Scynet – editorial note) because it has the potential to create more value for the society in different fields”, said Lubomir Minchev, CEO of Telelink.
The different ScyNet scenario
ScyNet combines two of the currently trendiest technologies – blockchain and machine learning, to allow the development of powerful AI tools outside megacorporations such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Such a project requires enormous processing power, which could be provided by miner nodes that are currently mining Ethereum, for example. Therefore, the team of ScyNet develops a decentralized network of computers, in which everyone could participate through computing power and contribute for the creation and training of autonomous AI agents. Deep Learning models and the computing power of all the computers in the network are the two magic ingredients that make that possible. As the whole system is based on smart-contracts, anyone participating in the process gets rewarded once the market has validated an agent.
The agents are aimed to make predictions and even some simple decisions based in various domains. The context in which the agents operate is called game – for example crypto currencies trading in which the trained agent would be capable of predicting what the price of a Bitcoin would be in five minutes and act accordingly.
From trading to healthcare
The first target market of ScyNet is trading. The team is, however, convinced the model would be then easily scalable across domains, as the machine learning technology has already been successfully involved in different fields, such as speech and image recognition, language processing, recommendation engines, biodata processing and diagnosis, self-driving cars.
“The simple goal of the network is to train better agents and develop better AI solutions. As the system is 100% decentralized anyone could participate and be rewarded for that. ScyNet’s test version of the network will be live early in 2019 and I hope to officially launch it by the end of next year”, Todor Kolev, CEO of Comrade Cooperative, told Trending Topics. So far seven software engineers and four marketing specialists have been working on the project.
ScyNet is one of the projects of Comrade, a digital cooperative of 21 developers working on several projects. The Comrade has so far attracted €570K funding to further develop its initiatives.
