Key Takeaways
- Decentralized AI platforms traditionally struggled to match the performance of frontier models.
- However, they are increasingly delivering impressive results.
- SingularityNET COO Janet Adams believes decentralized platforms will win the race to achieve AGI.
Advocates of decentralized AI have spent years promoting alternatives to the Big Tech platforms that dominate the sector. But they have only recently started to bear fruit.
At the bleeding edge of innovation, two of the most prominent decentralized AI ecosystems, Bittensor and the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI), are pushing the limits of what is possible and questioning assumptions about Big Tech leadership.
Toward Decentralized AGI
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is most commonly associated with Silicon Valley tech bros.
More or less explicitly, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg have all made AGI a top priority for their respective companies as they compete for AI dominance. Although the terminology sometimes varies, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all targeting the same goal.
But what if Big Tech doesn’t get there first?
“The AGI race is the biggest, hottest race on the planet right now,” observed ASI co-founder Janet Adams. “We want this to be won by Web3” to “break down the hegemony of big tech and free the world from [its] stranglehold,” she added.
ASI Alliance Targets AGI Within 3 Years
ASI consists of three parties: SingularityNET, a decentralized agent marketplace; Fetch.AI, a network of autonomous economic agents; and CUDOS, a distributed compute infrastructure. (Ocean Protocol was previously a member of the alliance, but walked away in October amid allegations of misused community funds.)
With CUDOS providing GPU firepower, SingularityNET and Fetch.AI share a similar approach to AGI. In contrast to Big Tech’s vision for a single, god-like AI, decentralized platforms connect thousands of individual models and agents through a unified framework.
By pooling global resources, Adams believes ASI can achieve AGI “within one to three years.” AI businesses and developers are already paying attention.
Major companies, such as Bosch and Deutsche Telekom, are experimenting with ASI technology, as are startups spanning biotech, robotics, and beyond.
Naturally, adoption has been especially prominent among projects already familiar with crypto and blockchain.
For instance, the TON treasury company AlphaTON recently forged a partnership with SingularityNET and CUDOS to accelerate the development and deployment of Telegram’s Cocoon AI network.
DATs Back Decentralized AI
Unlike their Bitcoin- and Ethereum-focused peers, digital asset treasury (DAT) companies operating in the decentralized AI space have begun to deploy their capital more productively, with a focus on supporting AI innovation.
James Altucher, an advisor to the Bittensor-focused DAT company, TAO Synergies, drew an analogy with the world of venture capital investment.
Rather than simply hoarding crypto, as MicroStrategy does, TAO Synergies is increasingly focused on staking its assets in Bittensor subnets. In doing so, it helps support the growth of up-and-coming AI projects, receiving an allocation of subnet tokens in return, he explained.
New Economic Models
The open marketplace models enabled by platforms like Fetch.AI, SingularityNET, and Bittensor are transforming the AI economy and creating new opportunities beyond the ivory towers of Silicon Valley.
Providing an example, Altucher pointed to Subnet 62, also known as Ridges.
Ridges works as a decentralized marketplace for coding agents. Software challenges are broken down into individual tasks. Autonomous agents compete to provide the best solution and earn a reward.
“Somebody in Uzbekistan who’s not going to get a job in San Francisco at Google might be the best programmer on the planet to create an AI coding assistant. He can be a miner for ridges and become a millionaire in a matter of a month or two,” Altucher said.
The prospect of making a living from decentralized AI platforms isn’t just a nice idea.
According to Altucher, Ridges founder Shakeel Hussein “hasn’t raised a single dime” from the venture capital (VC) investors that have traditionally funded AI innovation. “He’s ignoring calls from VCs because he doesn’t need it.”
Reaching a Tipping Point
Ridge’s success is built on fstrong performance. Before it has even fully launched, the platform has surpassed all open-source models on coding benchmarks and is rapidly closing on the leading frontier models.
As the gap between Big Tech AI and decentralized alternatives shrinks, Adams believes the movement is “reaching a tipping point.”
“I used to believe that decentralization would lead to AGI, but now I can really feel it happening,” she declared.
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James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
