Any interesting recent projects at the intersection of ML and Blockchain? On-chain learning might be too far fetched but has there been any progress around compressing and deploying a reasonably sized model as a contract to get inferences from?

CTO @ Morphic. Previously @ Polygon, @ Uber. Working on disrupting Hollywood with GenAI

https://nf.td/abv

My project Mercury is about getting data to ML projects in a decentralized way... which is slightly different from what you asked but still related.
Also, I can't recall the project name rn, but saw one recently doing exactly what you described on Starknet.

Cheap Compute --> God Machines --> Eternal Life. Working on this at /mercury

Mercury seems to be solving a very relevant problem. Signed up for beta. Looking forward to trying it out.