Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has raised the alarm over the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) censorship, coinciding with crypto exchange Robinhood’s recent acquisition of AI-powered investment advice platform Pluto. 

According to Bloomberg, the move goals to bring tailored investment strategies and analytics to Robinhood’s retail brokerage users. Still, Hoskinson’s concerns clarify the potential risks of centralized control over AI algorithms.

Robinhood’s AI-Driven Acquisition 

Robinhood’s acquisition of Pluto Capital, founded by Jacob Sansbury, marks a strategic step towards bolstering the platform’s capabilities. 

Pluto is renowned for its AI-driven personalized investment advice and real-time analytics, offering services traditionally accessible only to wealthier investors. 

Mayank Agarwal, Robinhood’s Vice President of Engineering, lauded Pluto’s “impressive platform” and expertise in artificial intelligence, emphasizing their shared mission to “democratize finance.” 

Integrating Pluto’s AI-powered tools is anticipated to increase Robinhood’s efforts in serving its customer base, particularly retail traders, by providing updated market information and personalized investment recommendations based on individual portfolios.

Nonetheless, Hoskinson, in a recent social media post, expressed his ongoing concerns about AI censorship and its far-reaching consequences. 

Research Team Backs Cardano Founder’s Concerns

The Cardano founder highlighted the potential lack of utility over time as artificial intelligence models undergo “alignment” training, whereby certain knowledge is forbidden to future generations based on the perspectives of a select group of people that remain unaccountable and beyond electoral reach. Hoskinson stated: 

This suggests certain knowledge is forbidden to every kid growing up, and that’s decided by a small group of people you’ve never met and might’t vote out of office.

Backing Hoskinson’s concerns, the research team behind “Cardano GPT” affirmed the issue, citing centralized control over a model’s training data as an enormous factor. 

When a small group of people exclusively controls and restricts the training of an AI model based on their perspectives, the prospect of biased or censored information arises, they noted. 

The team suggests that decentralization of language models (LLMs) is a possible solution to beat this challenge. Nonetheless, the limited computing power of decentralized storage solutions currently hinders widespread adoption, making mass usage of those models lower than 1%.

A hybrid model solution has been proposed to cope with this issue, aiming to strike a balance between centralized training data and decentralized LLMs. This approach seeks to mitigate concerns related to censorship while enabling broader access to advanced language models.

Since the acquisition of Pluto by Robinhood propels AI-driven capabilities contained in the retail investment sphere, the concerns raised by Cardano’s Hoskinson and the proposed hybrid model solution highlight the importance of transparency and democratization in developing and deploying AI technologies.

On the time of writing, the native token of Cardano, ADA, was trading at $0.401. The token has displayed favorable price movements recently, showing a 4% increase previously 24 hours and a 6% increase over the past 7 days.

Featured image from DALL-E, chart from TradingView.com