Korok Ray, Bitcoin researcher and Associate Professor at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, announced plans to launch The Bitcoin Research Institute to drive academic research at the intersection of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence.
At the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations 2024 event, Ray made note of Bitcoin’s potential to enable secure multi-party computation (MPC), offering the example of poker players agreeing on the state of a particular game as a basic form of computation.
He expanded this example to include deep neural networks and agent-based reinforcement learning, whereby artificially intelligent agents could collectively perform computations in the context of the Bitcoin blockchain. Ray’s vision made note of new developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem such as BITVM, which allows off-chain Turing complete computation, as in the case of MPC, to be verified on Bitcoin.
For more on BitVM read: “The Big Deal With BitVM: Arbitrary Computation Now Possible on Bitcoin WIthout a Fork” by Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine Technical Editor
Ray went on to propose his thesis, describing Bitcoin and AI combined as “The Undiscovered Country”: