Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology are two of the most transformative forces in the contemporary tech landscape. When combined, they have the potential to revolutionize industries and reshape the future.
In this article, I’ll explore the top four crypto projects at the intersection of AI and blockchain, each pushing the boundaries of innovation and offering unique solutions to real-world problems.
Numerai (NMR)
Numerai is a unique hedge fund powered by a global community of data scientists and AI researchers. It operates at the intersection of AI, data science, and blockchain, offering participants the chance to earn NMR tokens by developing predictive models.
Numerai hosts weekly data science competitions where participants submit AI models to predict financial markets’ outcomes. The unique aspect is that participants’ submissions are obfuscated, ensuring data privacy. Successful models earn rewards in NMR tokens, creating a novel way to incentivize AI innovation through blockchain.
Fetch.ai (FET)
Fetch.ai (FET, “B”) is an ambitious project seeking to enable wide-ranging automation through software agents utilizing AI and blockchain tech.
Founded in 2017 by a team of academics and entrepreneurs, Fetch.ai allows users to create "uAgents," — lightweight programs that leverage AI to operate autonomously on behalf of users.
At the core of Fetch.ai is the idea that virtually any entity — individual, organization, device or data source — can be represented by a uAgent. These agents handle tasks like scheduling, searching, negotiating and executing transactions based on dynamic inputs and machine learning models. They interact with other agents in Fetch.ai's "Agentverse," a virtual environment populated by digital representatives.To make agent creation accessible, Fetch.ai provides tools and templates that abstract away much of the complexity. It uses innovations like large language models to allow for simple communication between agents and users. And Fetch.ai's introduction of DeltaV in 2023 brought more consumer-friendly AI services like a conversational travel booking bot.
The native FET token powers Fetch.ai's proof-of-stake blockchain. FET is used for staking, governance voting and paying fees. The token aligns incentives between providers and consumers of resources on the network.
By tackling AI, multi-agent systems and blockchain in unison, Fetch.ai demonstrates how blending cutting-edge technologies can enable automation at a grand scale. If successful, Fetch.ai's digital agents could pervade many facets of economics and society — scheduling rides, placing orders, managing finances and potentially much more with little direct human involvement.
SingularityNET
Launched in 2017 by Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET (AGIX, Not Yet Rated) aims to integrate artificial intelligence with blockchain technology to form a decentralized AI marketplace. SingularityNET's primary goal is to democratize access to AI technologies. It facilitates a marketplace where AI services can be bought and sold, leveraging blockchain for transparency and security.
Its native token, AGIX, serves as the currency within this ecosystem. They are used to conduct transactions, incentivize participation and reward contributions. SingularityNET offers a range of AI services, spanning various sectors. AGIX's role extends beyond SingularityNET, with potential collaborations and integrations across different blockchain and AI projects.
Cortex
Cortex (CTXC, Not Yet Rated) aims to bring advanced AI capabilities directly onto the blockchain by overcoming key limitations of existing smart-contract platforms.
While blockchains like Ethereum (ETH, “B+”) have enabled a new world of decentralized applications through smart-contract virtual machines, these systems severely restrict the computational and storage resources available. As a result, running machine learning models for image recognition, natural language processing and other AI tasks has so far been unfeasible on-chain.
Cortex seeks to change this status quo by expanding the computational capacity and instruction set exposed to smart contracts.
The project centers on a new blockchain tailored for AI workloads, with innovations at four layers:
Computation Layer: Cortex incorporates new virtual machine instructions like floating point operations that are crucial for numerical computations in machine learning. This expanded instruction set unlocks new potential for smart contracts to run AI algorithms directly.
Storage Layer: Storing and accessing the large datasets required to train machine learning models is enabled through innovations in Cortex's decentralized storage layer. Advanced compression algorithms and optimizations allow large model files to be stored on-chain.
Incentive Layer: CTXC, the blockchain’s native token, aligns incentives between contributors of AI models, validators that run inferences on-chain and general users. This ecosystem facilitates the exchange of AI algorithms and services on the platform.
Accuracy and Privacy: Unique mechanisms like formal verification of models and trusted execution environments protect the accuracy and privacy of on-chain AI computations. This ensures reliability and confidentiality when running inferences through Cortex smart contracts.
By combining these capabilities at the intersection of blockchain and AI, Cortex unlocks the ability to infuse advanced intelligence directly into decentralized applications.
Everything from finance to healthcare and e-commerce to gaming is prime for disruption by this new generation of AI-powered smart contracts pioneered by Cortex. With a solid technical architecture and thorough understanding of challenges in fusing AI and blockchains, the Cortex project offers immense promise going forward
