- Cardano and Midnight Founder Charles Hoskinson warned academics and entrepreneurs that they could lose their original ideas when they feed them to AI platforms.
- He said Midnight’s privacy-focused chain lets people leverage AI for work while keeping control of their logs and interactions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly making it much easier for researchers to gather information on a wide range of subjects. For academics and entrepreneurs, the technology offers ways to synthesize complex data, draft concepts, and streamline problem-solving.
On the other hand, Cardano (ADA) and Midnight (NIGHT) founder Charles Hoskinson warned that using AI to develop intellectual property (IP) comes with a heavy toll: people risk surrendering their original ideas to the system. As a result, their concepts could be absorbed by a centralized system without proper attribution or compensation.
OpenAI Claims Solving the Navier-Stokes Equation
Last week, OpenAI announced that it solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem. It was a near-century-old mathematical question about the predictable behavior of fluids and gases.
The company stated that a group of AI agents derived the equation using a next-generation Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) model more advanced than GPT-6 Astra. However, Jay Cummings, a math professor, claimed he has been working on the subject for almost a year and appears disappointed about OpenAI casually tweeting about it.
Cumming’s post caught Hoskinson’s attention, which led to the Cardano and Midnight founder warning people about what AI could do to one’s original work.
Midnight Fixing the AI Dilemma for Researchers
According to Hoskinson, once people feed their ideas to AI platforms, they’ve effectively given up their hard work to the system. He explained that academics and entrepreneurs who do it risk losing control of their concepts.
The CEO of Input Output (IO) also highlighted that AI developers like OpenAI have complete access to every interaction people have with their platforms.
“At any time, OpenAI can go take it, and Sam Altman can make it his,” said Hoskinson.
Meanwhile, Hoskinson revealed that Midnight, Cardano’s privacy-focused partner chain, can actually solve the underlying dilemma of researchers using AI in their projects. He emphasized that the chain’s design, combining zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) with a selective data disclosure mechanism, gives them full control over their AI logs and interactions.
“So, why does Midnight fix this? Because it creates private environments for the AI and so they can’t read your logs,” Hoskinson pointed out. “You get all the upside of the inference, but you get none of the downsides. You don’t have to share your invention or have your intellectual property stolen from you.”
