Decentralizing AI with Tokenized Ownership: A Fight Against Tech Giants

The recent fluctuations in share prices of the six most capitalized companies in the U.S. highlight the urgent need for decentralizing the artificial intelligence economy. Despite their impressive quarterly profits and revenue, these tech giants, including Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia, are engaged in a spending war over AI supremacy, with daunting capital expenditure numbers that spooked investors. The combined annual revenues of these six companies amount to $1.8 trillion, and their market capitalization reaches $15 trillion, accounting for one-third of the entire S&P 500 index. However, their relentless competition for world domination poses significant risks to human autonomy and safety. The development of large language models and AI machinery within closed, black-box systems raises concerns about who controls AI and whether their incentives align with humanity's interests. To mitigate these risks, it is essential to create distributed, collectively owned open-source AI, which can be achieved through Web3 and blockchain technology. This approach would avoid misaligned incentives and provide a moral and economic path forward. Nevertheless, time is of the essence, as The Six have a substantial war chest of $15 trillion, enabling them to acquire startups and integrate breakthroughs in AI into their centralized system. To counter this, it is necessary to supplant equity financing models with full user-owned, token-based systems, where users can earn tokens for contributing compute and data to open-source models and use these tokens to pay for services delivered by their personal AI agents. The crypto and blockchain industry must reimagine itself, prioritize interoperability and collaboration, and focus on addressing real economy-wide problems to succeed in this fight. The Decentralized AI Society is working towards advancing common interests around standards, reference architectures, and open-source protocols to create a decentralized AI economy that benefits all humanity.