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

Seems like others also have similar questions. 

https://twitter.com/gakonst/status/1616544866489753600?s=20&t=hwF-QZ0XssQkGssJZGgLlA

Founder of @mercury - bringing cheap and scalable compute to AI developers 

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

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.

Not sure if it's what your looking for, but https://fetch.ai/ is at this intersection. 

In particular, check out their collective learning docs and the collective learning projects built there https://docs.fetch.ai/colearn/about/