Apple made a big splash on Monday announcing its surprising decision to plow $500 billion into AI server production and data center upgrades. While Anthropic joined in the centralized AI pool party, debuting Claude Sonnet 3.7—dubbed as its “most intelligent model” featuring advanced AI reasoning.
Despite wave after wave after wave of centralized AI innovations, updates and launches in recent months—a truly disruptive artificial intelligence model is bubbling to the surface. Since Thursday there have been three significant developments within the decentralized AI sector.
In grossly oversimplified terms, decentralized AI is basically the “love child” of both AI’s creative reasoning and blockchain’s superior security, immutability, veracity and transparency.
The programmable, largely open source and far-flung, distributed server networks of DeAI provide several benefits compared to the centralized, cloistered AI models. Even though closed sourced models grab most of the AI attention and headlines they have difficulty beating the strengths of DeAI such as:
- Eliminating single points of failure for the AI model.
- No single entity controls access or development to the respective DeAI algorithms and software.
- While various governance and oversight models exist across DeAI models—none are autocratic.
- No one organization is responsible for all capital expenses to build massive data centers and new power generation facilities due to DeAI’s sprawling footprint—those costs are borne by incentivized participants.
- The open source nature of most DeAI models fosters transparency into how the solution works without the “black box” secrecy of centralized AI models.
- The immutability of the blockchain and its ability to see all transactions— pseudonymously—has the potential to significantly reduce fraud.
Decentralized AI Moves Forward With Fetch.ai
Those differentiators have been driving a lot of innovation and advances within the AI space. On Tuesday, Fetch. ai announced the launch of what it claims is “the world’s first Web3-native large language model.” It’s called ASI-1 Mini and is capable of enabling AI agents to autonomously make complex decisions. In contrast to traditional AI models, ASI-1 Mini interacts directly with Web3, allowing users to invest in, train and own their own AI models using a decentralized framework.
This means ordinary people can have a hand at actually shaping the AI revolution. The model’s functional capabilities match that of centralized AI systems, as ASI-1 Mini executes a high performance levels while running at a small fraction of the hardware cost—making powerful AI more accessible and efficient.
Central to ASI-1 Mini is its mixture of agents and models architecture—linking up AI systems in a way that they will choose the most appropriate agent or model for any task. This enables more accurate, contextually relevant decisions, whether for enterprise automation, research or high-stakes use cases in areas such as health care. ASI-1 Mini also has multiple new reasoning modes, which adjust with complexity, yielding insights while allowing improvements on both speed and efficiency.
CEO of Fetch.ai—Humayun Sheikh — wrote in an email exchange that ASI-1 Mini is just the first step.
“For the upcoming tool-calling feature, we are introducing multi-level, multi-step reasoning. The model will evaluate all alternatives for using a tool, as well as the outcomes of not using it. It can select the best course of action based on task requirements and available resources, minimizing dependence on external human intervention,” he explained.
Ocean Makes A Decentralized AI Splash
On Saturday, decentralized AI organization O.XYZ announced the debut of Ocean, which at its core is described as a hyper-fast AI search engine and conversational assistant. Ocean combines text-based Q&A capabilities with voice features.
Users can submit spoken queries through a dictation interface—named Miss O—receive spoken responses and explore an evolving range of conversation-driven applications. It’s also able to draw from web resources in real-time.
O.XYZ CEO—Ahmad Shadid—explained that Ocean runs on a specialized model LLama 3.3 architecture, which makes it the fastest among benchmarked providers.
“We base these claims on direct speed tests comparing Ocean model’s response times with those of prominent AI services, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Each user prompt on Ocean includes a live speed test indicator, giving a transparent view of our system’s rapidity. While exact benchmark numbers vary by query complexity, internal metrics consistently show significantly faster replies,” he added.
Coinbase Lists Bittensor’s DeAI Token TAO
On Wednesday, operators of the Coinbase digital asset exchange tweeted its intent to list Bittensor’s native crypto coin TAO for purchase and trading. Bittensor is the most developed and leading decentralized AI network on a blockchain.
The TAO coin is used to incentivize AI developers and subnet owners on Bittensor’s DeAI network. They earn TAO for providing the most used apps and solutions that provide the greatest benefit to its Web3 community—as determined by those same community members and network validators.
While TAO is now available for Coinbase trading across most U.S. states, there are a handful of locales where Coinbase doesn’t allow residents to make purchases—largely due to regulatory barriers those states have in place.
According to the Coinbase website, TAO purchases may be restricted in Alabama, California, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
Despite those restrictions, having the largest digital asset exchange in the country list this DeAI-focused asset is a big step toward wider adoption of decentralized artificial intelligence. Evan Malanga is Chief Revenue Officer for Yuma—the purpose-built accelerator and incubator for startups within Bittensor’s ecosystem—says DeAI’s time has come.
“The recent Coinbase listing of TAO demonstrates that decentralized AI is quickly gaining momentum, with Bittensor at the forefront. The interest in and velocity of development in the space is reminiscent of the early days of Bitcoin. In many ways, TAO is similar to Bitcoin: both were fair-launched off a white paper, feature the same tokenomics and have a passionate global community driving further innovation and development in their networks. Permissionless intelligence is ushering in the next major era in crypto and beyond,” he wrote in an email exchange.
Yuma’s CEO, Barry Silbert echoed those sentiments in a recent X/Twitter post to his more than 776,000 followers on that platform, receiving nearly a quarter million views.
“We launched Yuma in November to support and drive development on Bittensor by providing startups and enterprises with access to the capital, infrastructure, and technical resources needed to explore and build on Bittensor. As part of our big bet on the convergence of crypto and AI, we believe the DeAI category provides massive growth potential alongside the broader AI sector,” he stated.
It’s clear that decentralized AI is coming to disrupt the entire AI sector, whether or not centralized AI competitors are ready for it.
