NEW YORK: European blockchain company The Bitfury Group, valued recently at more than $1 billion, has launched its artificial intelligence (AI) division, the company’s top official said in an interview.
The AI division will operate alongside Bitfury’s existing blockchain services and remain part of the company. Bitfury is one of a handful of blockchain companies around the world with at least a $1 billion valuation. That list includes Coinbase, a US-based exchange, and China’s Bitmain, the largest cryptocurrency mining firm in the world.
Valery Vavilov, chief executive officer and co-founder of Bitfury, said the need to analyse and extract value from tons of available data drove the company to go into artificial intelligence, that branch of computer science that emphasises the creation of intelligent machines that act and behave like humans.
“Data is becoming the next oil,” Vavilov said. “We have collected so much data, but only 2 per cent of all this data has been analysed; 98 per cent is sitting idle and waiting to be analysed.”
He believes the best and most efficient way to analyse the data is through artificial intelligence.
“We also need to trust that data so that’s where blockchain comes in,” Vavilov said.
— Reuters
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