Crypto sleeps while AI builds the richest data set monopolies

The author argues that the crypto industry has critically misallocated its attention by focusing on DeFi forks and token speculation while AI companies have quietly established the most powerful monopolies in history: data monopolies. These AI giants, like OpenAI and Google, have scraped vast corpora of human knowledge to train foundation models, creating prohibitive moats that are far more permanent than protocol dominance in crypto because the training data sets are not portable.

Crypto's focus on yield farming and speculative growth has led founders to ignore the crucial, yet unexciting, infrastructure needed to counter this centralization: data set attribution protocols. These protocols would involve cryptographically signing data licenses, logging usage, and routing micropayments to original creators, mirroring the foundational, unglamorous work that built early crypto successes like Ethereum and Chainlink.

The window to build this decentralized intelligence infrastructure is closing rapidly, perhaps within two years, before AI models become self-reinforcing and their control over the information environment becomes absolute. The author concludes that crypto must pivot immediately to build this data attribution infrastructure to uphold its founding thesis of preventing centralized control, or risk becoming irrelevant as AI companies control the future of intelligence.

(Source：Cointelegraph)