In mathematics, Jasper Zhang is seen as a kind of Zeus. He says he won gold medals at the Math Olympiads in China and Russia, and it took him just two years to get his PhD. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Now he’s trying to solve an important problem at the intersection of two of the fastest-growing yet most complicated fields: blockchain and AI.
Hyperbolic, the two-year-old startup that Zhang leads that focuses on decentralized AI computing, said Thursday it is introducing a protocol called “Proof of Sampling (PoSP),” aimed at addressing challenges with trust in decentralized AI networks.
Hyperbolic was co-founded in 2022 by Zhang and Yuchen Jin, who have a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington.
According to the team, the concept for the new protocol was developed in collaboration with researchers from Berkeley and Columbia University. It combines math, computer science and economics, using “advanced sampling methods and game theory to boost integrity and minimize computational requirements in decentralized networks,” Hyperbolic shared in a press release with CoinDesk.
Zhang, 28, said in an interview with CoinDesk that he sees PoSP as the next iteration of authentication for decentralized networks.
“People initially thought there was only one way to do verification, and that is through consensus,” Zhang said. “People will find out later optimistic evidence and then ZK evidence.”
Now there is PoSP, he said, and it can be applied not only to AI, but also to rollups, a kind of layer 2 blockchain, as well as so-called actively validated services (AVSs), which are protocols secured by resetting protocols such as EigenLayer.
a research paper on the Proof of Sampling Protocol by Zhang and several co-authors was submitted on May 1 to arXiv, an open-access repository hosted by Cornell University for scientific articles that have not yet been peer-reviewed.
According to the newspaper, the design is based on a ‘pure Nash Equilibrium strategy’. That refers to a game theory concept attributed to Princeton University-educated mathematician John Nash, who was the subject of the 2001 Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.
Here is a figure from the article that illustrates the architecture:
As part of the release, Hyperbolic introduces ‘spML’, an implementation of PoSP built specifically for AI authentication.
“SpML leverages the fundamental principles of PoSP to create an authentication mechanism that is not only faster and more secure, but also economically feasible,” said Zhang in the press release.
Now they just have to prove that it works in practice.
Read more: The enablers of decentralized AI