Opinion by: Samuele Marro, PhD Student in Machine Learning at the University of Oxford
Web3 AI’s space fell into a trap. Somewhere, “Decentralized AI” became synonymous with “blockchain AI.” This incorrect equivalent is actively harmful to change.
Excellent decentralized AI projects that oppose themselves in blockchain frameworks, not because of technical meaning, but because that is the only way to access web3 funding, expertise and community. Blockchain-first mentality is not just limiting what could be decentralized AI; It cannibalizing it.
Web3 is not blockchain
Web3 Goals appeared from Cypherpunk: No trust, no permission, resistance to censorship and user -owner. The industry has forgotten a critical difference: Web3 philosophy is different from blockchain technology. The BitTorrent is Web3. Tor is web3. IPFS is web3. And now that the web3 AI is in the middle of the hype, many find blockchains are often unsuitable.
Jump into any web3 AI space, and you’ll see the same pattern repeated: Brilliant Teams Building distributed by learning networks, peer-to-peer (P2P) AI marketplaces and distributed training systems, all awkwardly explaining why they need a token or how their onchain work works.
As a counterexample, take care of Federated learningWhere many nodes work together to train a shared AI model while maintaining their raw data private. This is a key example of decentralized AI: Tokens are not required.
That won’t say the blockchain is never useful. Onchain regulating can simplify payments between AI agents, proof cryptographic can improve reputation systems, and tokens can align incentives in collaboration. But these are specialized tools, not a size-appropriate-all solutions. For many decentralized-AI problems, blockchain overhead only increases latency, complexity and cost.
A game of incentives
Why are projects doing these decisions? The answer lies in how the Web3 The ecosystem has changed. Projects that exclude blockchains are not considered “Web3” and thus cannot access web3 funding pipelines, specialized networks or community resources. In their thesis, adventure funds with “Web3” have built an investment standard around the integration of the blockchain. Web3 AI spaces treat projects that are not blockchain that are out of range.
These incentives drive teams to adopt a blockchain not for product reasons but for accessing ecosystem. In other words, they make architectural decisions based on fundraising requirements rather than the best user results. There is nothing wrong with playing the game, but that means many opportunities for real (and varied) applications of decentralized AI are unnoticed.
The industry should acknowledge that the three unique concepts are artificially combined.
Related: Can the blockchain give the guards to maintain the AI course?
Decentralized AI includes shared computing, federated learning, P2P network and side computing, none of the natural requirements of blockchain infrastructure.
Crypto-integrated AI involves token incentives, cryptographic proofs, digital asset management and legitimate use cases that can be implemented using blockchains.
The Web3 AI represents the user’s ownership, unauthorized change and community management, which can be achieved through many technological techniques.
These concepts can work well, but they don’t need to. A federated study network can use cryptographic privacy guarantees without touching a blockchain. An AI -shared market may implement a reputation -based verification without intelligent contracts. Incentive systems can operate through consensus mechanisms that do not require overhead of a full blockchain infrastructure.
Decentralized AI requires a toolbox
The real change in decentralized AI requires technological pluralism, whose blockchain is a toolkit tool, not a religious requirement. The most successful projects in the next decade are those who choose the right architecture for their specific challenges, not those who agree with the current expectations of the ecosystem.
Web3 funding and community support should change to embrace Non-blockchain Decentralization. Venture funds can get a huge return to decentralized and aligned web3 projects, even though their funding model is not token -based.
Communities should celebrate unauthorized change regardless of its technical substrate. For example, many decentralized AI ecosystems exist beyond crypto, both nonprofit and for-profit. Prime Intellect trained large language models in size while maintaining decentralization. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Nanda is building a decentralized internet of agents. Laion has done the AI research research.
These systems have achieved true decentralization; They do not carry a blockchain badge and do not see most of the web3 community. Even in the more traditional web3 AI space, however, there are positive signals from projects that only use blockchains when it makes sense.
Numerai uses the chain to manage stakes for community -generated models, rewarding the best performance. The Torus Network distributes token rewards clearly to agents that contribute more to its long-term growth while taking the network value to the token. Payment based on the render network token means that anyone, anywhere, can compute the render farm. Here are all these applications.
The current blockchain-first approach prevents the change in decentralized AI accurately if it is needed. While AI systems become stronger and more centralized, there is a desperate need for decentralized successors. But this will not be achieved if the ecosystem continues to force each solution through the blockchain bottleneck. Projects that pour a bad mindset today will dominate the ecosystem tomorrow.
The Web3 AI is faced with one option: Continue to censorship decentralized AI with blockchain requirements or release it to achieve its full potential. Technology is ready. The question is whether the ecosystem is ready to change and who can achieve this change.
Opinion by: Samuele Marro, PhD Student in Machine Learning at the University of Oxford.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be done as legal or investment advice. The views, attitudes, and opinions expressed here are unique and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of the cointelegraph.
