Decentralized AI is regaining prominence in recent months as more people start to explore the intersection of Web3 and generative AI. While most people agree that decentralization can have positive benefits for AI, the specific technical paths run into major roadblocks.
When thinking about decentralizing AI, it is important to realize that AI tends to increasingly evolve more towards centralized architectures, which makes any decentralization effort incredibly challenging. For decentralized generative AI to overcome those natural challenges, it needs to rely on or influence four key trends:Decentralized AI is an inference game and nothing elseFoundation models need to be adapted to run in decentralized infrastructures.
Any centralized market can use a counterbalancing force. In that sense, it is tempting to think that blockchains could be that element. While that conclusion is directionally correct, in order to materialize, it will require the push of external market forces as well as the mainstream adoption of open source generative AI and the evolution of Web3 infrastructure and foundation models.There is no decentralized generative AI without open source generative AI.