ORA Launches On-Chain AI Oracle on Ethereum Mainnet

According to Blockworks, verifiable oracle protocol ORA is launching its on-chain AI oracle (OAO) on the Ethereum mainnet. In the coming weeks, the oracle will also be live on Optimism, Base, Polygon, and Manta. Implementing machine learning (ML) or AI onto the blockchain provides machine learning computation access to blockchain verifiability, validity, fairness, and transparency. However, there have been challenges in bringing AI on-chain due to decentralization requirements and Ethereum's computation environment being designed for EVM smart contracts. ORA's solution is through its OAOs, powered by optimistic machine learning (opML) on Ethereum. OpML can design any ML model on-chain, but with weaker security assumptions. According to ORA's documentation, opML uses a "verification game" similar to that used by optimistic rollup systems to enable a decentralized and verifiable consensus on the machine learning service. Once a requester initiates an ML service task and the server finishes it, the results are committed on-chain. A verifier must then validate the results, similar to what is done on an optimistic rollup. If the results are inaccurate, a dispute game with the server will begin, and the claim will be sent to an arbitration smart contract for a resolution. Grok, a generative AI chatbot; Stable Diffusion, a deep learning text-to-image AI model; and Llama2, Meta's open source large language model, are now available through ORA's OAO. Kartin Wong, the founder of ORA, noted in a press release that "only opML can put Grok on-chain. This is ORA's opML supremacy." Another type of ML that has been experimented with on-chain is zero-knowledge ML (zkML). This technology aims to generate cryptographic proof for ML computations that can be succinct enough to be verified on-chain. However, current computing power cannot practically generate proofs efficiently and affordably. Wong claims that, in contrast to zkML, opML can efficiently bring Grok's 314 billion parameter model on-chain, reducing overhead costs by over 1,000,000x.