Martin is absolutely right to question this stuff. The problem with decentralized AI protocols are:
1. There is no cost/time effective way to do useful online-training on a highly distributed architecture of commodity hardware. This would require a big breakthrough that I’m not aware of yet. It’s why FANG spends more money than all the liquidity in crypto to acquire expensive hardware, network it, maintain data centers, etc.
2. Inference on commodity hardware sounds like a great use case, but the hardware and software side is evolving so rapidly that commodity decentralized underperforms for most critical use cases. See latest openai latency and growth in Groq.
3. On its face, doing inference off of properly routed requests to a gpu cluster closely co-located to the request sounds like a good idea, and using a decentralized cryptocurrency to crush the cost of capital to compete against aws by incentivizing hobbyists to participate sounds smart. But given so many providers, and fractured liquidity in the GPU spot market, no one has aggregated serious supply to offer to anyone running a real business.
4. The software routing algos need to be really, really good. Commodity hardware across consumer operators is very spotty operationally. Forget breaking out of networks and congestion control, if someone decided to play a game or use anything that leverages webgl, you might have an operator that blips out. Unpredictable supply side adds operational headaches and lack of certainty to demand side requesters.
Tough problems that will take a very very long time to solve. The bids are all memes.