decentralized-ai
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Dillon Rolnick
Dillon Rolnick is the chief executive of Nous Research, an applied AI lab building open-source, human-centric language models and the decentralized Psyche training network. A Vanderbilt graduate who came up through quantitative FX trading at Effex Capital and founded the litigation-claims firm Crysknife Capital, he moved from finance into AI research leadership, helping steer Nous through a Paradigm-led $50M Series A and, by 2026, a reported $75M round near a $1.5B valuation. His focus is proving that world-class models can be trained openly and over the internet rather than behind the walls of a few large labs.
Jasper Zhang
Jasper Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbolic, an open-access AI cloud and GPU marketplace based in San Francisco. A math prodigy who won gold medals at the Chinese and Russian Mathematical Olympiads and finished a UC Berkeley math PhD in two years, he moved from quantitative research at Citadel Securities to blockchain research at Ava Labs before founding Hyperbolic in 2022 with Yuchen Jin. His mission: make large-scale AI compute affordable and available to anyone with an idea, from students to enterprises.
Matthew Wang
Matthew Wang is the founder and CEO of OpenGradient, a New York company building a decentralized compute layer for verifiable and confidential AI. A former Two Sigma research engineer who cut his teeth on equity-options market-making infrastructure, he left quant finance in 2024 to chase a simpler question: can you prove that the AI answering you is the AI you think it is? OpenGradient runs models on-chain with cryptographic proofs and hardware enclaves, and has raised $9.5M led by a16z crypto, with backing from Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, and angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Illia Polosukhin, and Sandeep Nailwal.
Han Jin
Han Jin is the co-founder and CEO of Bluwhale, a San Francisco AI company building an intelligence layer on the blockchain that lets people own and monetize their own data. Born in China, raised in Germany, and trained as an engineer at KIT and UC Berkeley, he first made his name building the LucidCam - one of the earliest consumer 3D/VR cameras - at Lucid VR. A Forbes and Inc. '30 Under 30' honoree, he now wants to turn the world's 7 billion smartphones into a decentralized AI network that rivals Google and AWS but is owned collectively by its users.