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Delphi Digital Co-founder: Why I'm Bullish on the Combination of Crypto and AI?

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This article delves into the trend of combining cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, and analyzes the potential impact of this combination on future technological development.

Original author: Tommy, Co-founder of Delphi Digital

Translation by: TechFlow

Introduction

This article delves into the inevitable combination of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, and analyzes the potential impact of this combination on future technological development. The author also discusses the differences between centralized AI and decentralized AI in terms of functionality, transparency, and ethics, and looks forward to the future application prospects of cryptocurrency and AI.

The combination of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence is inevitable

When I first tried Midjourney and ChatGPT, their power initially made me feel fearful. Their powerful functions initially made me feel scared. I had a complete lack of understanding of their abilities, which made me feel a sense of survival crisis. I realized that although current large language models are only good at completing our sentences, they are inevitably closer to the comprehensive general artificial intelligence (AGI) that can deeply influence our thinking.

The media's description of AGI is an all-encompassing application or a robot like iRobot, which underestimates its true impact. AGI will penetrate every aspect of life, even without your awareness. Take AI2041 as an example, which is a vision of the future where a family's AI insurance application evolves to limit their daughter's love based on her ethnicity and risk analysis of her true love. This illustrates how deeply AI will integrate into our lives and have an impact.

(Editor's note: AI2041 is a science fiction book that explains how AI will fully penetrate our lives in the future.)

Every science fiction movie depicts a utopian future of artificial intelligence because that's what sells, but that's not the reality. Regardless of how ethical and moral the board of OpenAI may seem, they still have biases inherent to human existence, and we cannot allow these biases to have a negative impact on all applications and use cases built on these foundational models. You may enjoy conversing with ChatGPT, but what if your AI jury in court uses facial recognition technology to see your skin color or unique spelling of your name, resulting in a longer prison sentence? These impacts are unsettling.

Centralized artificial intelligence is an inevitable trend. Once Google requests your permission to access your gDrive, gDocs, and gmail, your personalized AI will start to play its role. I expect that Apple will launch personalized artificial intelligence on every device because they are lagging behind in the global AI competition and need a perspective that can consolidate their brand security. If OpenAI slightly adjusts the model, which affects the entire society and impacts thousands of customized ChatGPTs built on these models, can you accept it?

We need an alternative solution. Cryptocurrency can be perfectly combined with AI because transparent global human coordination is the foundation of this movement, which can benefit humanity worldwide through the use of artificial intelligence. By crowdfunding (using cash or GPU) to create and fine-tune open-source models, anyone can audit in real-time whether there are biases or issues in the models, which is the safest way to move forward in the world of accelerated artificial intelligence development.

I believe we are heading towards a world with billions of AI models, whether it's individuals downloading and personalizing these open source models, or projects and companies building their own model sets for specific use cases (such as Uniswap LP provision, exchange risk analysis, Delphi AI analyst).

Cryptocurrency and AI are a perfect combination, with the cornerstone being auditability of the most powerful technology, community ownership, and community direction. Whether it's using everyone's GPU to train models and give them ownership in the model, DeFi and smart contracts utilizing AI to expand their capabilities in their use cases, or AI tailored specifically for you, this match makes logical sense.

Decentralized artificial intelligence will transparently share the internal operations and ownership of the most powerful technology of our generation. Centralized artificial intelligence cannot provide this core value.

In the end, AGI will use cryptocurrency because it will trust code and mathematics, rather than physical bank branches and human whims. The future evolution of artificial intelligence will use cryptocurrency, and we should do the same.

Cryptocurrency x AI: Themes and Reflections

AI's Cyberpunk Values

All of the cypherpunk values outlined by Vitalik for Ethereum apply to artificial intelligence: decentralization, open global participation, resistance to censorship, neutrality, and cooperation. The idea of rebuilding artificial intelligence under the guise of centralization in Web2 is laughable.

AGI and Unlicensed Currency

AGI's utopia or utopian trajectory tends to be a way of thinking that interacts with permissionless currency to achieve its desires. Future AGI will not have a bank checking account. It will further build decentralized AI and cryptocurrency, not controlled by the Federal Reserve or the OpenAI board, but using cryptocurrency.

DePin and AI are a clear use case

In the past decade, all of our research has been focused on how to make ultra-large-scale data centers more efficient and effective. In the next decade, I expect technology to lean towards utilizing potential GPUs and user hardware for AI model training and inference. Obviously, the demand for H100 that Nvidia can provide is limited, and technology companies also have some control over existing products. Making our Mac Pro GPUs and other hardware widely available for training and inference is a clear and visible use case. The market leaders currently include io.net, Akash Network, and gensyn.

In the future, there may even be a path like this, where Nvidia transitions its road and no longer sells its H100, but instead builds its own largest cluster.

Incentivizing the creation of new models

On the basis of application-level creativity, we need to motivate the development of new models. This includes providing funding for training, crowdsourcing specific training data, and incentivizing hosting models for inference. Large language models are just one type of AI model, and even so, there are dozens of leading models (such as Bard, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.). Users from around the world can provide their GPUs, capital, or data to train and fine-tune models, and own a portion of the final model.

Developing Smarter Applications and Smart Contracts with AI

Decentralized AI will provide better applications. Smart contracts that reference AI models can expand the design space of applications, greatly increasing their logic and capabilities. Imagine Uniswap's liquidity provision being influenced by large-scale off-chain models, and using ZK to ensure that the models are not tampered with. Examples include Inference Labs, Giza, and Modulus Labs.

Just take a look at Testmachine, which provides a predator mode to audit your encryption code in real-time and learn from it, instead of waiting for an expensive manual audit for 6 months. Or check out the large machine learning model provided by Upshot, which provides accurate pricing for NFTs.