Author: Haotian
Some people think that my criticism of web3 AI is just a one-sided view of web2 AI? In fact, this is not the case. Anything I have written about web2 DeepSeek, Manus, MCP, and the like does not mean that I am "favoring one and disfavoring the other". From the very first day of cheering for AI + Crypto, I have been thinking about how to create innovations in web3 AI, how to evolve the narrative, and where the development problems lie, and how to adjust them. This is the case now, and will be the case in the future. The reason is very simple:
1) My main focus is in the AI + Crypto field, and I have some understanding of the innovative development of web2, but not enough to see the whole picture, so I don't make absolute judgments, just like most people, I only know that after a series of innovations in web2 AI, web3 AI collapsed, and after serious research, I found that web2 AI is steadily progressing in terms of talent echelon, innovative thinking, and pragmatism, which is in line with the market's expectations for the development of AI, and that's all.
Indeed, I have fantasized that if such innovations appear in the web3 AI track, it would be great, no need to compete with the web2 team, find a differentiated path, do some web3-specific narratives and technical implementation, at least to live up to the technical faith of the 'buy the dips' Holder;
Unfortunately, the expectations have been repeatedly dashed, seeing the token prices of those mainstream projects approaching zero indefinitely, seeing old and new believers leaving with their flesh, I am really furious, can't keep up with the differentiated innovation of technology compared to web2, and don't even want to play the narrative and hype of web3 expertise?
2) Sitting on the Crypto, I really don't have the grand mission of revolutionizing human technology like AI. From the beginning, I understood that AI is an opportunity for the Internet, and Crypto also needs this opportunity. The true meaning of AI + Crypto is actually to endow Crypto with the new soul of AI, so that the "old narratives" that Crypto has once hyped up and become too bubble-like can be revived one by one, we just need to treat AI as a new productive Catalyst.
Based on this premise, whether it is the new developers entering the field to do AI, or the original web3 old developers wanting to do innovation with new narratives, they should anchor a goal: to use the Tokenomics + decentralized flexibility and resource advantages of web3 to do web3 Native narrative innovation.
Web3er must admit that the key to the current prominence of web2 AI Agent is to bring a leap-forward innovation experience to the C-end users through "monopoly + scale", which is an advantage that web3's AI Agent cannot possibly have, and trying to compete head-on is not a match for web3 AI.
However, precisely, some upstream distributed framework layers, some distributed trust frameworks and incentive network designs that web2 is unwilling to touch, as well as the design of components for interacting and communicating on-chain beyond the Agent computing layer, are the points where web3 is worth focusing on. That is also the point that "future AI" development to a certain stage cannot avoid, and is also the differentiated advantage of web3 AI.
