Democratizing AI: The Psyche Network Architecture

TLDR: Psyche is an open infrastructure that democratizes AI development by decentralizing training across underutilized hardware. Built on DisTrO and its predecessor DeMo, it dramatically reduces data transfer and coordinates distributed training via the Solana blockchain, creating a fault-tolerant and censorship-resistant network.

Introduction

The development of advanced AI models has become increasingly centralized, requiring massive computational resources that only large corporations can afford. This concentration of power threatens innovation and limits who can contribute to progress, while enormous amounts of computing power sit idle or underutilized worldwide.

Psyche changes how we develop AI by creating a decentralized infrastructure that allows anyone to participate in training large language models. Rather than requiring massive infrastructure with thousands of accelerators in a single location, Psyche coordinates training across distributed, heterogeneous hardware worldwide. This abundance of underutilized hardware provides an opportunity to train and use LLMs without high investment costs.

Development Roadmap

1. Cooperative Training: Beginning with a permissioned testnet and moving toward a fully decentralized environment.

2. Accessible Inference and Advanced Capabilities: Expanding to reinforcement learning and capabilities that enable reasoning models.