The rise of AI use cases in Web3

As we recover from Valentines day hangover, let us look at how the relationship between two key technologies, AI and Blockchain has evolved over the years and what's happening at the convergence of these two technologies.

Two mainstay technology paradigms of the last decade have been Blockchain and AI. While decentralised technologies have been around only for almost a decade and a half, the concepts around AI have been discussed, researched and worked on for almost a century, perhaps more.

One could argue that the AI seeds were sown with the launch of the book 'Wizard of Oz' in 1900. In 1950s Alan Turing published his paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' hypothesizing that robots could become intelligent in the future. Innovators in this space kept looking for a programme that was coded to become intelligent like humans.

It was only after the monstrous creation of data through social media and search engines, that machine learning models started to show some green shoots. ChatGPT, on that note, is a milestone we will all potentially look back as an Apple iPhone moment for AI.

I wanted to however focus this article on the intersection of web3 and AI. While Web3 had a pretty bad year in 2022 and is still going through a bottoming process, AI has enjoyed a spring, and since the break of the New Year, perhaps started to see some summer sun.

A few days back, I published an article about Bitcoin Loophole on Cointelegraph . It was more of a description of Bitcoin Loophole, which is an automated crypto trading platform. A robot can take user preferences (risk/returns choices) and trade on their behalf with high levels of success. However, AI use cases that the decentralised world is exploring are not just trading applications.

Here are some interesting use cases that bring the two technologies together.

SingularityNET are building a decentralised marketplace for AI solutions. Developers can create and publish AI services which can be used by organisations and other participants of the platform through APIs. Based on a pricing they agree in a trustless fashion, the payments for usage happens via smart contracts. The platform offers AI solutions from image manipulation to gene sequencing.

Alethea AI is building a decentralized protocol to create intelligent NFTs (iNFTs), that would become avatars on their metaverse. I first heard about iNFTs last year from Akshay Sharma who went on to show me how it all worked using the algorithm he was building. Developers can use the iNFT protocol to Create, Train and Earn from their iNFTs in their Metaverse named 'Noah's Ark'.

Fetch AI are not too different to SingularlityNET. They have launched libraries that help better querying of data. They offer decentralized machine learning solutions for Agents to then build modular and reusable solutions. Agents build P2P solutions on this infrastructure. The economic layer across the entire data layer happens on a blockchain to track usage and manage transactions through smart contracts.

Numerai stole my attention with the tag line " Build the world's last hedge fund". Surely, once this is built, hedge funds would go out of business? I am not sure if that would come true, but they are building a decentralized platform to predict the markets. They are also building-in SocialFi features like leaderboards and reputation scores.

Apart from these use cases, there several data/API focused use cases like the Ocean Protocol and The Graph that are seeing tremendous traction. The use cases are exciting, and since the ChatGPT hype began a few months ago, most of these AI/Data focused web3 protocols and applications have seen a jump in price action.

In the previous crypto cycles, we have seen DeFi, NFTs, and L1 subseasons with each of them rising in prominence and demanding investors' attention. This cycle might see data use cases within web3, right from decentralised storage, to plumbing with APIs and the intelligence layer aka AI.