Cardano Founder Urges Caution On AI Risks Amid Robinhood’s Technological Push

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 aims to bring tailored investment strategies and analytics to Robinhood’s retail brokerage users. Still, Hoskinson’s concerns shed light on 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 expected 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.

However, 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 loss 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 individuals who remain unaccountable and beyond electoral reach. Hoskinson stated: 

This means certain knowledge is forbidden to every kid growing up, and that’s decided by a small group of people you’ve never met and can’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 a significant factor. 

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

The team suggests that decentralization of language models (LLMs) is a potential solution to overcome this challenge. However, the limited computing power of decentralized storage solutions currently hinders widespread adoption, making mass usage of these models less than 1%.

A hybrid model solution has been proposed to address 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.

As the acquisition of Pluto by Robinhood propels AI-driven capabilities within 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.

At 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 in the past 24 hours and a 6% increase over the past 7 days.

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