Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly one of the hottest topics within the cryptocurrency industry (and well beyond it) throughout the past few years.

With the advent of firms dedicating their efforts to further improving and developing various AI-based tools and programs, many crypto projects have also integrated novel technology within their protocols.

You can take a look at some of the top AI cryptos in one of our deep dives on the matter.

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, recently attended the Ai4 Conference, an event focused on Artificial Intelligence held in Las Vegas from August 12 to 14. He delivered the keynote, addressing some of the challenges of merging blockchain and AI.

AI Leveraging Blockchain

Summarizing his keynote was the Chief Technology Officer of IOHK, Romain Pellerin.

Hoskinson said that artificial intelligent is capable of leveraging blockchain-based technology as a trust and incentive layer in an attempt to build decentralized marketplaces for data, inference, and models.

He outlined that the role of blockchain in AI could revolutionize data management, incentivizing sharing, and creating decentralized marketplaces for computation and inference.

Moreover, Cardanos founder outlined that tokenization and incentives may offer solutions to AIs reliance on vast data and computing power.

What About the Challenges?

Although the executive found plenty of intersections, he also pointed out that there are a lot of challenges ahead.

The fundamental difference between blockchain and AI, such as privacy concerns, resource scarcity, and determinism, create incompatibility. Coordination remains key, but merging these systems may prove difficult.

In addition, he said that privacy in the development of AI solutions remains a critical issue, but fully holomorphic encryption (FHE) could potentially enable private smart contracts and secure data sharing without having to compromise privacy.

Integrating AI and blockchain is hindered by technical incompatibility and the first-mover problem, but complementary solutions could emerge, addressing these challenges. Hoskinson said.