Venture capital firm Dragonfly partner Rob Hadick said at the inaugural Emergence conference held in Prague on Friday that cryptocurrencies have a problem, which is that they take things that are working very well off-chain and make them worse, then put them on-chain and sell them to people who are already on-chain:
That's basically what's happening in this intersection of AI/crypto.
Attendees believe that the most likely value that AI can bring to the cryptocurrency field is to help developers write programs more efficiently, as software development is still the core of the cryptocurrency field. CoinFund Managing Director David Pakman mentioned that the Web3 field has built a lot of software, and AI should be used to improve the operation of various decentralized applications, including infrastructure, security, and user application behavior.
But these two venture capitalists unanimously stated that in order to challenge the large centralized giants in the AI field, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Facebook, decentralized AI systems are unlikely to shake the position of these centralized giants within this cycle.
Rob Hadick mentioned that Dragonfly hopes to see some product-market fit, and has been quite skeptical of ideas around decentralized training or on-chain model or machine learning. David Pakman agreed that decentralized projects are unlikely to disrupt centralized giants within this cycle, but expressed appreciation for the builders trying to develop alternative systems:
If we want a highly centralized AI future, we should continue on the current path. But if we want an alternative future where the computational resources to train truly large AI models are more decentralized, and potentially democratically accessed, then we should be discussing the wonderful ways that Web3 can play in decentralized access to the technology stack or hardware.
Are AI agents being overhyped?
In addition, Rob Hadick questioned the AI agent projects, comparing the AI agent craze to the 2021 blockchain game craze:
We've done one investment in the agent space, which is probably a winner-take-all market, and I think that space is going to see hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of crypto VC money flow in, but almost everyone is going to lose a lot of money.
However, David Pakman is relatively optimistic about the future of AI agents, outlining a future based on agents and how it can facilitate synergies between AI and cryptocurrencies, believing that cryptocurrencies can provide an ideal payment infrastructure for AI agents.
