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What is the current state of AI?

It took ChatGPT just under two months to reach 100 million monthly active users. One in every five Americans uses LLMs in their day-to-day life, with half being under the age of thirty. We are in the early innings of consumer market fit with a Cambrian explosion of AI applications being built. Yet, the way AI predominantly exists today is not sustainable:
  1. Data & compute oligopoly: The race for better model performance has come down a moatless tug of war over access to user data and GPU resources. Regulatory capture and monopolization is becoming the de facto standard.
  2. Closed model monopolies: The best performing models (see model leaderboards) are dominated by centralized research powerhouses (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) unwilling to share their methodology or open-source their weights.
  3. Alignment autocracy: Models are subjectively censored by centralized corporations under the guise of AI safety and fairness.
  4. Privacy violations: User data, including private conversations, is commonly used as content for model training, eroding any notion of privacy.
  5. Arbitrary censorship: Centralized AI-servicing corporations selectively censor requests, users, and even entire nations.
  6. Forced trust: Users consuming closed-source AI models must trust operators to run models correctly without manipulating their inputs or cheating them with worse models.
  7. Limited user preference: Users have limited choice over optimizing for speed or cost, instead defaulting to just the hosted services offered by model providers. Limited competition inhibits cost improvement.
  8. Platform risk: Developers building on centralized AI face competition from the providers themselves, risking having their business stolen and losing their underlying API access.

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Why does AI need to be on-chain?

It is more crucial than ever to maintain AI systems that are transparent, unbiased, and free from undue control. AI has the power to do significant good in the hands of many, but without open access, governance, and ownership, may unintentionally do more harm.

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Crypto is the only proven decentralizing force

There is no technology in the world with as powerful a claim to decentralization as crypto. Fundamentally, blockchain networks enable self-sovereign control of data and capital, without reliance on singular intermediaries. The very nature of these immutable ledgers supports perpetual verifiability and provenance. Naturally, blockchains empower composability, letting AI applications combine, interoperate, and grow intelligence.

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Top models will be open-source

Open-source LLM model evals have rapidly converged to the performance of state-of-the-art, closed-source models, closing the gap that existed just two years ago. Developers now have credible alternatives to break free from reliance on centralized AI providers. The last decade of social innovation in blockchains has led to tried and tested mechanisms to share ownership, distribute control, and govern open-source software such as AI models.
Crypto × AI venn diagram

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Ritual is the conduit for Crypto × AI

Ritual is purpose-built to decentralize access to AI compute:
  1. Enshrined compute: Ritual enshrines AI models, enabling ownership and provenance.
  2. Censorship resistant: Anyone can decentrally join, validate, and contribute to Ritual.
  3. Composable: Ritual enables AI composability powering use cases like Smart Agents.
  4. Verifiable AI Provenance: Ritual enables open- and closed-source model verifiability.
  5. Privacy: Cascade powers Ritual’s industry-defining inference privacy.
  6. Modular computational integrity: Ritual empowers applications to choose the computational integrity primitive that best fits their use case.
  7. Optimized user cost: Users dictate their speed/cost preference via Resonance.
  8. Node specialization: Hardware-optimized nodes specialize in compute via Symphony.
  9. Developer tools: EVM++, EIP Extensions, Scheduled Transactions, Enshrined Oracles, Infernet, Modular Storage, and more powerful AI application building blocks.
  10. Model monetization: Ritual enables users to train, track, and trade AI models.
  11. Familiar interface: Ritual is seamless for both Web2 APIs and Web3 smart contracts.