The Cortex Virtual Machine (CVM), is ported from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with added support for AI inference. The CVM is backward-compatible with EVM and capable of running both traditional smart contracts and AI smart contracts.
The CVM has two layers: infer instructions and deterministic inference engine.
Infer instructions allows models to be called in contracts through instruction sets, including Infer (code: 0xc0), InferArray (code: 0xc1).
The deterministic inference engine is called Synapse or the CVM Executor. It guarantees the consistency of AI inference results in heterogeneous computing environments, without significantly compromising performance or accuracy. Synapse proposes a model-based fixed-point execution framework and a corresponding deterministic machine learning operator library. AI developers can train and quantize their models using MRT to be executable on CVM.