Internet Computer Teases Latest Evolution In AI Smart Contract Engine

Barely one month after talking about the introduction of the world’s first blockchain-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) represented on a smart contract, Internet Computer (ICP) has now hinted at a major evolution in the pursuit.

Internet Computer Is Advancing AI Smart Contract Capabilities

In an X post, ICP founder Dominic Williams highlighted a massive acceleration of AI smart contracts on the protocol. He acknowledged the work done by the DFinity team on the smart contract engine, citing that it has accelerated deterministic floating point instructions by 10X.

“We continue on our mission to run sophisticated LLMs as smart contracts,” Williams said “In the demo, image classification is now running 3X+ faster (across 3-4 blocks through consensus compared to 10-12 before). Naturally, the gas/cycle costs of AI inference has come down commensurately.”

The team achieved this increased speed through broad low-level work, and this includes “commits to the public Wasmtime virtual machine implementation of WebAssembly.” 

Say hello to a massive acceleration of AI smart contracts 🧠 on the Internet Computer #ICP blockchain.

Brilliant work by the @dfinity team has accelerated deterministic floating point instructions by 10X. We continue on our mission to run sophisticated LLMs as smart contracts… pic.twitter.com/PmoBXwTjvm

— dom.icp ∞ (@dominic_w) April 19, 2024

The upcoming optimization is expected to push the protocol farther than it already is. 

It is worth noting that ICP is investing so much resources into its AI foray and this brings it closer to competing with top AI companies like OpenAI, Google and even Cognition Labs which launched the first AI software engineer dubbed Devin.

More Features To Come on ICP AI Innovation

This next optimization will encompass the integration of SIMD instructions into the smart contract execution environment, a move that Internet Computer had earlier talked about. 

In the long run, this will allow multiple floating point calculations to be performed in parallel by the execution of a single instruction. There are also plans to migrate the ICP smart contract environment from 32-bit Wasm to 64-bit Wasm.Notably, the migration will boost the number of AI model weights that can be loaded into contract memory “from 2B to whatever is needed for sophisticated LLMs,” the ICP founder explained. Additionally, the ICP team will provide new APIs allowing canister smart contract code to export AI computations for accelerated processing on GPUs.

These plans are an indication that ICP is committed to boosting its AI infrastructure. Introducing the Internet Computer AI in March, was crucial to portraying the protocol’s mission to develop a system where powerful LLMs run as smart contracts on the ICP. The Internet Computer AI runs on DFINITY’s ICP testnet, but allows developers to transfer the code to the public network where it would run.