Foreword

Recently, OpenAI’s Sora made an astonishing debut, releasing a plethora of prompts and demos that stunned the world. Artificial Intelligence directly propelled the cryptocurrency market’s AI sector, making any coin related to AI a hot commodity and eliciting frenzied market sentiments. Upon analysis, this article categorizes the current AI sector into three main types: 1. Concept tokens related to Sora, such as WLD; 2. Cryptographic applications built on ChatGPT and similar platforms; 3. Underlying infrastructure focusing on decentralized computing and more. This article will focus on the relationship between decentralized computing and AI.

AI Partners with Blockchain, Decentralized Computing to Become Essential

The combination of blockchain and artificial intelligence is set to profoundly transform the current world. Fundamentally, blockchain technology introduces a new paradigm for transaction settlements, data storage, and system design; whereas artificial intelligence represents a revolution in computing, analysis, and content production. The innovation and integration of these two industries are unlocking new use cases, which may accelerate the practical application of both in the coming years. Currently, many projects are exploring this area, but most are still in the experimental and development phase, with some already experiencing overhyped speculation.

Although it’s uncertain which AI applications will break through, an explosive growth of AI applications in the future is inevitable. Consequently, a large-scale interaction of AI on the blockchain will occur, making the decentralized computing market a necessity. Its development is also expected to experience explosive growth.

In the past decade, as models have become increasingly complex, the demand for computing has grown exponentially. For instance, OpenAI found that from 2012 to 2018, the computational demands of its models grew from doubling every two years to doubling every three and a half months. This led to a surge in demand for GPUs, with some cryptocurrency miners even using their GPUs to provide cloud computing services. As the competition for computing resources intensifies and costs rise, some projects are leveraging cryptocurrencies to offer decentralized computing solutions. They provide on-demand computing at competitive prices, enabling teams to afford the training and operation of models.

Projects like Akash, io.net, iExec, and Cudos are examples of decentralized computing applications that offer data and general computing solutions. Additionally, they provide or will soon offer specific computing resources dedicated to AI training and inference. Among them, Akash is a PoS network built using the Cosmos SDK. Initially, it offered storage and CPU rental services. In June 2023, Akash launched a new testnet focused on GPUs, followed by the launch of a GPU mainnet in September, enabling users to rent GPUs for AI training and inference.

Decentralized Computing Emerges as a New Trend, Filecoin Makes Significant Progress in 2023

Initially known for its storage solutions, Filecoin has evolved beyond its original scope and now offers open data services. As officially announced, in 2023, Filecoin has transformed into a foundational L1 platform for computing networks, leveraging its robust data infrastructure to facilitate large-scale computations. This innovation allows various L2 computing networks to seamlessly integrate and optimize different features, simplifying the transition of web2 applications to web3. This integration is particularly beneficial for applications requiring extensive data processing. Currently, a vibrant community comprising over a dozen teams is working within the Compute over Data (CoD) working group to devise innovative solutions for computing networks.

Moreover, in 2023, the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) was released, with its Total Value Locked (TVL) surging to $280 million (as of December 31, 2023), marking a monthly growth rate of 46%. In terms of data storage, the total volume of user data loaded onto the platform has doubled since January 2023 and has increased 19-fold over the past 18 months, with a total of 2 million terabytes of user data stored on the Filecoin network. Additionally, Filecoin has rapidly developed in terms of data retrieval and availability. Furthermore, leveraging the scalability of InterPlanetary Consensus (IPC), decentralized applications can achieve global scale through recursively scalable subnets, sub-second transactions, powerful computational workloads, and a WebAssembly runtime highly adaptable to developers’ needs.

Decentralized Computing and DeFi Will Propel Filecoin’s Explosive Growth

Entering 2024, Filecoin undoubtedly continues to hold an absolute advantage in storage and data retrieval. However, this article posits that what will truly ignite Filecoin’s explosive growth is its decentralized computing and the growth of DeFi brought about by the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM).

With the introduction of InterPlanetary Consensus (IPC) to the Filecoin mainnet in 2024, applications built on Filecoin’s vast storage, computing, and infrastructure advantages are expected to proliferate. Especially with the surge in generative artificial intelligence and computing networks specialized for AI inference and training, it is anticipated that more specialized computing networks will utilize Filecoin’s data storage, as well as construct blocks with FVM and IPC. All these Layer 2 (L2) developments will channel more utility, storage usage, staking demand, and transaction volume back to the Filecoin mainnet.

Accompanying the launch of FVM in 2023, the demand for Filecoin collateral significantly increased through protocols such as GLIF and StFIL. As builders begin to leverage FVM to channel more capital flows on-chain (e.g., payments for storage transactions, computing services, and retrieval tasks), new use cases will emerge. Should this scenario unfold, it would greatly expand the use cases for the FIL token, thereby driving up FIL’s price.

Furthermore, with the surge in rollups, DA layers, etc., the total quantity of chain states in web3 is experiencing explosive growth. In the future, more blockchain and DePIN networks may follow Solana’s lead, storing their complete archival chain state on Filecoin. This move would enable cheaper, more verifiable long-term storage and make it easier for dapps, smart contracts, and node operators to access.

Summary

With the surge in popularity of Sora, the AI sector has seen significant growth. However, crypto applications based on AI are still in their early stages and vary in quality, so investors should proceed with caution. In comparison, the future trend of decentralized computing is more apparent. In addition to Filecoin, Akash is also worth noting.

Declaration:

1. This article is reprinted from BitpushNews, originally titled “Sora Ignites the AI Sector, Decentralized Computing to Witness Explosive Development.” The copyright belongs to the original author, Asher Zhang. If there are any objections to the reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, who will process it according to the relevant procedures as quickly as possible.

2. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not constitute any investment advice.

3. Translations of the article into other languages are provided by the Gate Learn team. Without mention of Gate.io, copying, transmitting, or plagiarizing translated articles is not allowed.