Trigger warning: very stupid question to follow. To my smooth-brain naiveté, this feels like the sort of thing that we could reward with some sort of cryptocurrency in a blockchain? It's difficult to achieve gains, but it's relatively quick to independently verify (5 minute training runs). I know "blockchain all the things" is sooooo 8 years ago, but I'm looking at the descending graph of progress here, and wondering…
I had this idea in 2019 -- "p2p machine learning" with some sort of incentive. It makes a lot of sense to incentivize contributing. My idea was that you could earn "credits" for participating, which you could exchange for compute resources from the "swarm" later, on any given problem (training, local inference, etc).
The practical challenge is that adding a blockchain means agents also need to participate in consensus, store and sync the ledger, and run the rest of the network infrastructure on top of the actual research. So it needs a unit economic analysis. That said, all results already include full source code and deterministic metrics, so the hard part of verifiable compute is already solved. You could take this further with a zkVM to generate cryptographic proofs that the code produced the claimed score, so nobody needs to re-run anything to verify. Verification becomes checking a proof, not reproducing the compute.
Compute-credits are interesting. Contribute GPU time now, draw on the swarm later for training, inference, whatever you need. That's a real utility token with intrinsic value tied to actual compute, not speculation.