Sahara AI, a company co-founded in 2023 by Sean Ren, an associate professor in computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, has raised $43 million to pursue its goal of widely implementing a platform to ensure IP-owners are compensated in the age of generative AI. Ren, who launched the company with former Binance Labs Investment Director Tyler Zhou, says the funding will be used to expand its team and further develop a decentralized AI blockchain platform that recognizes and tracks copyrighted assets, ultimately establishing a system of credit and compensation for work that contributes to model training.

“Sahara’s platform is aimed at allowing participants to get credit for their contributions, whether for building models and tools, or providing data and expertise to make them work better,” Bloomberg writes, stating the outcome sought “is to have verified, trackable data, and then pay the person or business for their contributions, from companies that build the infrastructure to developers building tools and bots.”

Tech giants such as Google, Amazon and OpenAI have built foundation models — respectively, Gemini, Bedrock and GPT — that are trained on massive amounts of third-party data, with returns primarily accruing to the companies that own the models, which can then be used to train or customize other large models. For instance, OpenAI’s GPT is the underlying framework for Copilot AI from Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI.

While the companies have been subject to legal challenge for uncredited use, there has emerged no easy means to tag or track protected IP, which is where Sahara AI comes in.

Sahara envisions “a different approach — one where AI is open, equitable, and beneficial to everyone across all stages of the AI development cycle,” according to a blog post about the funding round, which was led by Binance Labs, Pantera and Polychain, with participation from Samsung, Sequoia Capital and others.

“We are building a collaborative AI economy,” Ren, CEO of Sahara, told Bloomberg. “As AI technologies evolve, it’s critical that a robust, decentralized infrastructure be available.”

Sahara “has about three dozen enterprise customers,” notes Bloomberg, including Microsoft, Amazon and Snap Inc. Ren also claims the platform has amassed 200,000 contributors to its data crowdsourcing.

“The most tangible copyright application is personal data, for example, photos, text messages and emails, and we’re afraid of losing control of our personal data to the likes of OpenAI,” Ren added. “If privacy and copyright are taken care of, it could trigger a lot of exciting AI use cases such as making personal replicas of yourself.”

“Data forms the building block of generative AI to produce human-like creation, but the booming sector has come under scrutiny over concerns over fair use of data, copyright and privacy issues,” writes Reuters, noting that “meanwhile, the crypto and blockchain sector has also drawn significant interest from private investors this year.”