A Difficult Truth: The Unspoken Mismatch of Web3 and Generative AI

The intersection of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and Web3 is one of the most fascinating trends in the digital assets space. While most people agree that generative AI is likely to play a role in the next generation of Web3 technologies, the specifics are far from trivial. After all, AI was never considered an important building block in Web3 architectures, and the different generations of L1s and L2s were not designed to run AI workloads.

The reality confronted by Web3 technologists when trying to envision adapting Web3 runtimes to generative AI technologies is an overwhelming mismatch in terms of data and computation requirements. Generative AI workloads are designed to be computationally intensive, running on highly parallelizable GPUs. Blockchain runtimes are quite limited in terms of their data and computation capabilities.

Jesus Rodriguez is the CEO of IntoTheBlock.

At the same time, Web3 desperately needs to incorporate generative AI capabilities in order to catch up with Web 2 alternatives. The obvious question then becomes: how would the integration of generative AI and Web3 materialize?

From all the trends in generative AI, there is one that seems to be ideal for the incorporation of blockchain capabilities and that, coincidentally, gathered mainstream attention through the recent announcements made by OpenAI in its Developer Days conference: have you heard of autonomous agents?

Here, I would like to explore two key points:

1. Why most Web3 capabilities are only adding marginal benefits to the current wave of generative AI solutions.
2. Why autonomous agents are the one trend in generative AI that can incorporate Web3 capabilities.

We regularly read overhyped publications about how blockchain and generative AI technologies are a match made in heaven. Those statements are good for making headlines, but they lack the technical rigor of understanding the current state of both technologies. Going deep into understanding the possible integration paths between Web3 and generative AI reveals a very challenging picture.

Following a first-principles approach to think about the potential integration between generative AI and Web3, we can consider two fundamental dimensions:

1. A new generation of Web3 technologies that will leverage generative AI capabilities.
2. Generative AI solutions that…