2025-03-16 –, Main Stage
The next wave of AI progress depends on unlocking high-quality private data in a way that benefits everyone. While public internet data has been largely exhausted as a training source, a massive untapped resource exists in our collective personal data.
Anna Kazlauskas, OpenDataLabs CEO, and founder of Vana, will demonstrate how communities can pool their data through DataDAOs to create valuable training datasets that advance AI while ensuring privacy and shared benefits. Collaborative data infrastructure enables better AI that serves the public good.
The talk will explore how we can collectively overcome the "data wall" in AI development through community-owned data infrastructure. Drawing on experience building the Vana protocol and working with hundreds of DataDAOs, Anna will share both technical insights and practical examples of how collaborative data sharing leads to better AI outcomes.
Key topics include:
- Why quality private data is crucial for advancing AI capabilities
- How DataDAOs enable privacy-preserving data collaboration at scale
- Vision for foundation models trained on community-contributed data
- What it will take to make AI a public good
The presentation will emphasize how collective data ownership creates opportunities for innovation that benefit society as a whole.
Anna Kazlauskas is the creator of the Vana protocol and the CEO of Open Data Labs, a San Francisco-based research and technology company that emerged from the MIT Media Lab. With a background in computer science and economics from MIT, Anna is focused on building technical solutions that empower users to own their data and capture value from the AI models they help create.
Prior to founding Vana, Anna was an early core engineer at Celo, where she worked on making blockchain technology accessible on mobile devices to serve the billions of people who need financial services. She previously co-founded Iambiq, a Y Combinator-backed company that applied machine learning to document processing. Her research experience spans AI work at MIT's CSAIL as well as economic research at institutions including the World Bank, Federal Reserve, and European Central Bank.
Anna's vision for Vana centers on transforming personal data into a new asset class that can power decentralized AI while ensuring individuals maintain sovereignty over their information. Through her work, she aims to create a more equitable AI economy where users have both ownership and influence over the models their data helps create.