Is AI about to cause a mess? Calling for Decentralization innovation

The combination of Decentralization AI with blockchain and Crypto Assets can provide new insights and solutions for the industry.

Author: Dr. Max Li, founder of OORT and professor at Columbia University

The AI industry will experience a new round of rapid rise after entering 2025. The global battle for AI, led by China and the United States, will further intensify. It is foreseeable that hot money will continue to flow in, giving birth to a large number of startups and projects, but also leading to a sharp increase in failure cases. At this time, the industry needs to think calmly and avoid over-reliance on centralized AI technology. Decentralization AI combined with blockchain and cryptocurrency can provide new ideas and solutions for the industry.

AI Watershed: Global Battle for Influence in the Digital Era

AI competition is not only a behavior at the enterprise level, but also a part of national strategy.

The United States has recognized the strategic importance of AI and implemented strict export controls on advanced technologies to countries such as China. This has forced China to increase its domestic innovation efforts, such as state-supported investments pouring into companies like Huawei to develop domestic solutions to replace Nvidia AI chips.

It is expected that China will increase its AI research and development efforts in 2025, as will the United States. Capital from private and public domains will heavily enter the AI industry, and enterprise research and development will also surge. AI will also play a core role in key areas such as EV, defense technology, biotechnology, aerospace, and other critical fields.

Intense competition will drive continuous iteration of technological achievements and also create another round of bubble.

Internet Bubble Reappears?

Signs of a bubble similar to the late 1990s Internet bubble have emerged. Capital inflows and overly ambitious promises can lead to inevitable failures. With the emergence of new AI startups and anxiety among large enterprises, we are likely to see a wave of hastily designed, unfulfilled projects.01928374656574839201

The failure of AI in 2025 will be due to a lack of attention to real-world application and long-term value creation. Startups blindly chasing the next earth-shattering invention may fall into a speculative rather than industrial mindset. A large number of applications and platforms will emerge, but these applications are either redundant or lack credibility.

This Crisis of Confidence is particularly worrisome in 2C AI products. For example, the development of AI personal assistant robots for home use seems promising, but without guarantees of security, privacy, and ethical safeguards, ordinary consumers cannot trust adoption.

The Military Impact and Significance of AI

The application of AI in the military field has brought profound impact and complex challenges. The emergence of autonomous weapons, AI intelligence analysis, monitoring systems, and battlefield decision-making tools has brought about earth-shaking changes to modern military forces. However, these technologies have also raised significant ethical, operational, and existential issues.

The industry itself has a responsibility to follow and address the broader impact of AI in sensitive areas such as military applications, healthcare, and public policy, for example, by embedding ethical considerations into the basic framework of AI development to mitigate the risks associated with rapid technological advancement.

Solutions to Blockchain and Decentralization

One of the most pressing challenges in the field of AI is the 'black box' dilemma, which refers to the opaqueness and lack of auditability in AI decision-making. Blockchain, with its immutability and transparent ledger, provides a powerful solution to this problem by recording every stage of the AI lifecycle, from data collection and training to deployment decisions, ensuring the system's auditability and credibility.

By integrating the Blockchain into AI development, we can ensure transparency, enforce ethical guidelines, prevent monopolistic control, and align the AI industry with the principles of trust, decentralization, and human interests. We refer to this effort as 'Decentralization AI'.

Call for the Future

2025 will be a pivotal year for AI and Decentralization AI, a year that will bring breakthroughs, record investments, and a lot of failures. But if the industry sees these challenges as an opportunity to recalibrate, AI could become more powerful, more focused, and more human-relevant.

From investors, technical developers, regulators to consumers, everyone can think about the role AI should play in our lives: not only what kind of technology humans can develop, but why we develop these technologies and how to develop them responsibly.

The original article was published in Forbes: