This submit is tailored from w3w, my e-newsletter about rising know-how over on Substack. To obtain it in your inbox each Sunday, together with extra headlines from across the web about web3, AI, and extra, subscribe right here. 😊
In principle, the potential intersection of web3 and AI is actually intriguing. However in actual fact, real-world implementation has superior so little that the window of alternative for web3 to have an effect could also be closing.
So says DeFi entrepreneur Jesus Rodriguez in a current essay for CoinDesk. The co-founder and CEO of IntoTheBlock writes:
“AI innovation is compounding quickly, and Web3 has been a passive observer. Not one of the main AI milestones — unsupervised pretraining, superior fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented technology, reasoning engines, or agentic frameworks — have concerned Web3 architectures in a significant method.
“As every new launch compounds on the final, the limitations to catching up develop into steeper. All crucial tooling, platforms, and infrastructure for constructing frontier fashions are at the moment centralized. With out pressing, coordinated efforts to alter this trajectory, Web3-AI might be left many years behind in a area that advances in months.”
As if on cue, the headlines that broke within the days proper after Rodriguez printed this warning solely served to underscore his level:
- Meta — unmatched poster baby for the evils of centralized tech — introduced it could purchase a 49% stake within the startup Scale AI for $14.3 billion.
- Disney sued Midjourney, calling the AI picture generator “a bottomless pit of plagiarism.”
Ouch.
You understand, it’s virtually as if the web financial system is crying out for some native method for individuals to immutably doc identification, authorship, and provenance of mental property. Particularly as generative AI proliferates, it could even be helpful if this technique had been to allow straightforward digital funds, licensing, and assortment of royalties on IP.
Or we may all simply hold suing one another, working up authorized payments, and see how that seems.
Yeah. Certain. Let’s do the latter.