Investors take note, machine learning is beginning to have a powerful impact on generative art non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs are cryptographic assets on a blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other. Most often, NFTs are used to represent real-world items like artwork and real estate. “Tokenizing” these real-world tangible assets makes buying, selling, and trading them more efficient while reducing the probability of fraud.
With that in mind, AI is becoming increasingly important in the non-fungible token space. “Generative art” – art that has been created by AI — has quickly emerged as one of the main categories of the NFT market, driving innovative projects and investment in astonishing collections. From the works of AI art legends such as Refik Anadol or Sofia Crespo to Tyler Hobbs’s new QQL project, NFTs have become one of the main vehicles to access AI-powered art.
The rise of generative AI has come as a surprise even to many of the early AI pioneers, who mostly saw this discipline as a relatively obscure area of machine learning. Its leap to dominance in the NFT market has largely been driven by gains in computational power and next-gen MI algorithms that can help models learn without requiring a lot of labeled datasets, which are incredibly limited and expensive to build.
One of the most significant of these advances has been “text to image” (TTI). AI-driven TTI programs such as DALL-E and GLIDE allow users to describe in text what they would like the program to render, and it then creates an interpretive image based on the text, with some profoundly remarkable results. Thus making TTI ideal for the creation of unique and marketable NFTs.
There are also similar generative art solutions such as “text-to-video” or “image-to-image,” but TTI, by far, is having the greatest impact on the NFT market because a disproportionate percentage of digital art collectibles are represented as static images.
Throughout the history of technology, there have been many examples of seemingly disparate trends coming together to form a market symbiosis that benefits both. The most recent example is the social-mobile-cloud revolution, in which each one of those trends expanded the market of the other two.
Generative AI and NFTs are starting to exhibit a similar dynamic. Both trends have been able to bring complex technology to mainstream culture. NFTs complement generative AI with digital ownership and distribution models that would be nearly impossible to implement otherwise. Similarly, generative AI is likely to become one of the most important sources of NFT creation now and into the future.
How BigRio Helps Facilitate Investment in AI Startups
Like what is occurring with NFT and AI-generated art, BigRio looks for and helps to facilitate such market symbiosis.
We like to think of ourselves as a “Shark Tank for AI.”
If you are familiar with the TV series, then you know that, basically, what they do is hyper-accelerate the most important part of the incubation process – visibility. You can’t get better visibility than getting in front of celebrity investors and a TV audience of millions of viewers. Many entrepreneurs who have appeared on that program – even those who did not get picked up by the sharks – succeeded because others who were interested in their concepts saw them on the show.
At BigRio, we may not have a TV audience, but we can do the same. We have the contacts and the expertise to not only weed out the companies that are not ready, as the sharks on the TV show do but also mentor and get those that we feel are readily noticed by the right people in the growing AI investment community.
Because we see so many potential AI innovators, we are also ideally suited to create the kind of synergy between concepts and applications such as is occurring with AI, ML and NFTs.
Rohit Mahajan is a Managing Partner with BigRio. He has a particular expertise in the development and design of innovative solutions for clients in Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, Manufacturing, and other industry segments.
BigRio is a technology consulting firm empowering data to drive innovation, and advanced AI. We specialize in cutting-edge Big Data, Machine Learning, and Custom Software strategy, analysis, architecture, and implementation solutions. If you would like to benefit from our expertise in these areas or if you have further questions on the content of this article, please do not hesitate to contact us.