This week, we saw the announcement of the Superintelligent Alliance token merge: Fetch.ai, Ocean, and SingularityNET proposed to merge their tokens into a new one, $ASI. This merger, if approved by the community vote, would mean that the alliance would have a “fully diluted market capitalization of $7.6 billion across 2.631 billion tokens.”

The interest of venture capitalists in the intersection of AI and blockchain remained strong in 2022-23, despite a broader market slowdown affecting global VC funding. Coinfund, a crypto-native VC fund, invested in Gensyn, decentralized compute for Machine Learning, and Giza, decentralized Machine Learning inference computation. Paradigm, another prominent crypto firm, has invested in Numer.ai, an AI-powered and crowdsourced hedge fund.

Companies Merging AI and Blockchain Technologies

Generated Images And Artworks: Kojii.ai

With an unsustainably high amount of artworks made everyday using AI engines (MidJourney, Civitai, etc.), AI artwork is developing a public stigma similar to that of NFTs after the hyper-speculation of 2021. NFTs, however, are nothing more than media files (jpg, png, mp4, etc.) that can be transferred and stored verifiably using blockchain technology.

Kojii.ai seeks to marry customizable Generative AI technologies and NFTs to elevate their collective public perception. The platform enlists artists to train unique AI models tailored to a specific aesthetic or thematic vision.

Artists design bespoke UI/UX interfaces where users can manipulate AI outputs with weighted sliders, toggles, and drop-down menus. Users generate images from the model with the click of a button. While generating images is free, by purchasing credits that can be used to tokenize select images, users “immortalize any generated image(s) as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Avalanche blockchain,” which can then be traded, sold, and stored.

Artists are paid via this subscription-style credit system, and kojii.ai users can co-monetize the imagery they create. This project establishes a new paradigm for AI artwork, one which rewards artist and user creativity symbiotically.

Compute Marketplace For AI: PrimeIntellect

Training and deploying AI models requires massive amounts of computing power. Blockchain technology allows peer-to-peer transactions between individuals regardless of geographic locales, language barriers, Fiat currency denominations, and other external factors.

PrimeIntellect takes advantage of this capacity by allowing individuals and groups to sell access to their compute in a decentralized, permissionless marketplace. PrimeIntellect describes their business model as enabling “the training of large AI models using distributed resources, reducing costs and democratizing AI development.”

To access compute from anywhere in the world, on-demand, in a low-communication and trustworthy environment is to challenge the traditional computing infrastructure itself.

Open-Source AI Research: Nous Research

While multinational corporations like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google have massive in-house teams responsible for improving and innovating their proprietary AIs, it is open-source actors who are oftentimes responsible for the greatest advancements in any new tech.

Nous Research holds daily competitions for open-source developers to create AI models capable of “beating” OpenAI’s GPT-4, currently the gold-standard for public-facing AI models. This is judged via a complex, underlying system of automatic guidelines.

Nous Research rewards participants using Bittensor’s proprietary cryptocurrency, $TAO, based on their standings each day. Using cryptocurrency as an automated reward both economizes and incentivizes the open-source developer community.

Privacy And Security For AI-Based Oracles: Ora

As programmer and proclaimed “cypherpunk” Eric Hughes wrote in his landmark 1993 text, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto”: “Privacy is not secrecy… Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.” Much of the blockchain world operates off this underpinning.

Ora has pioneered “zkOracle,” which is “a new type of decentralized oracle network that utilizes zero-knowledge proofs” to confirm calculations within Smart Contract transactions.

In other words, Ora uses secure, AI-based Oracles to interact with Smart Contracts, removing the need for outside actors and keeping data definitively safe within each transaction.

Conclusion

While the market sector of AI + crypto is at its infancy, the first solid trends are here: art, open-source AI, and oracles. These streams all require the power of blockchain for payments and immutable and trustless proof.

FAQs

• What is the purpose of Kojii.ai?
  Kojii.ai is a platform that marries customizable Generative AI technologies and NFTs to elevate their collective public perception.
• What is PrimeIntellect’s business model?
  PrimeIntellect enables the training of large AI models using distributed resources, reducing costs and democratizing AI development.
• What is Nous Research’s business model?
  Nous Research rewards participants using Bittensor’s proprietary cryptocurrency, $TAO, based on their standings each day, incentivizing the open-source developer community.
• What is Ora’s solution for securing AI-based Oracles?
  Ora uses secure, AI-based Oracles to interact with Smart Contracts, removing the need for outside actors and keeping data definitively safe within each transaction.