The recent announcement of a $7.5 billion token merger bringing together the fetch.ai (FET), AGIX, and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) communities to form the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI) has marked a significant moment for the growing connection between blockchain and AI. While some have praised the merger for reducing friction and enhancing synergies, others have raised concerns about centralization. Julian Peh, CEO of Web3 AI base layer Kip Protocol, expressed worries about the emergence of monopolies in the AI sector over the past two years.
Peh highlighted the trend of companies like OpenAI monopolizing data and knowledge to train large models, ultimately controlling the regulatory process. He emphasized the importance of reclaiming ownership rights to ensure a voice in the AI-powered future. This is the very reason he founded Kip, aiming to create decentralized AI (deAI) infrastructure tools for blockchain developers.
For Peh and his team at Kip, a fair and competitive AI ecosystem involves separating ownership of models, apps, and data sets. They believe in providing a platform where individual developers can share data and components. The KIP Protocol implements mechanisms to automatically distribute revenues among app developers, model trainers, and data producers. When deploying an AI asset on-chain, developers set their price-per-query, which is recorded in the token metadata. Users pay the total price-per-query for accessing the app, model, and dataset, with the revenue shared among contributors by the KIP Protocol contracts.
This system allows for flexibility in pricing while encouraging market competition. Humayun Sheikh, chairman of the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance and CEO of Fetch.ai, also confirmed the revenue readiness of the $7.5 billion protocol. He mentioned plans to generate revenue through launching the agentic network for deployment and focusing on commercial products to enhance AI applications in the short term.
In conclusion, the merger of these communities into the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance signifies a step towards a more integrated blockchain and AI landscape, with a focus on decentralization, fair competition, and revenue generation.