_Unit Testing: Episode 2
zkML: Zero Knowledge Machine Learning
Welcome to
! I’m Kyle O'Brien, an early stage deep tech investor — alongside — and community builder based in Paris, France. I write what I see. These days, it’s mostly explorations into various categories of interest including:The Future of Computing
Blockchain Infrastructure (Privacy & Encryption)
Frontier Health
I enjoy taking complex topics and reducing them into accessible articles and top-notch memes. I also throw bangin’ dinner parties for cool people in tech and venture.
The crypto community has officially descended on Paris. Get ready for an inbox full of GMs and the Latin Quarter to be buzzing with incomprehensible crypto-speak (no matter your native language). Why are they here? EthCC of course — only the largest Ethereum community and technology conference in Europe. You may recall I went to EthDenver (and posted about it here) which was my very first introduction to the wild underworld of crypto-conferences. Now that I’m no longer a N00b, I’ll try and uncover some genuine insights and meet some interesting people.
Back in February, zero knowledge was already starting to swell as a hot theme in the space. During “crypto winters” the fallback tends to be on infrastructure and hardcore cryptography — good news for us: that’s where we invest. I expect fewer 20-somethings wearing hoodies inscribed with their $200K JPEG and more PhDs in math and cryptography. Either way, it’s sure to be an intense and informative few days.
Leading up to this, we recorded our second episode of _Unit Testing, a new series we launched to host conversations at the intersection of deep tech and frontier science. The subject of this episode is topical and timely: zero knowledge machine learning. If you want a closer look at why this matters, check out Rand’s
article titled Making AI safer with cryptography. In short, there are two rapidly growing technologies that, merged together, could solve a number of the problems facing the blockchain ecosystem today. As Rand summarizes, this stems from issues of trust.One of the biggest challenges however is trust:
trust that people will use AI for good, and not to do harm to others.
trust that the content we see is real and not AI generated.
trust that our data and queries remains private, and not visible to companies running the AI models
trust that the company offering an AI service is sending us the correct result, and not some made up one in order to manipulate us.
We were lucky enough to host a couple of leading experts on the subject for our latest discussion.
Daniel Shorr is the Founder & CEO of Modulus Labs (a portfolio company) working to build zkML to the mainstream.
Alana Levin is a partner at Variant Fund backing leading web3 founders.
Check out the full conversation below and subscribe either here or to our YouTube Channel (or both!) for future conversations.