Will cryptocurrency become the currency of choice for the future of artificial intelligence? Crypto investors are betting on it.

It’s hard to imagine a hotter sub-sector of cryptocurrency than artificial intelligence (AI). AI-based tokens, meaning tokens that rely on artificial intelligence for part of their utility, are everywhere, from Injective, which uses AI to “quickly ask, search, and find relevant information” on its network, to AnimeAIToken … basically, they’ve got you covered.

It’s hard not to hear about these tokens, as some of them produce more oil than a newly drilled oil well in Texas. Injective’s token, for example, is up 300% since announcing a simple integration with OpenAI in June.

I am hesitant to take most of the newcomers seriously because I view them as steam software (a product with no release date that never went into actual production) riding the AI ​​hype train. However, there is a growing narrative being spread by the likes of Bankless Bros that cryptocurrencies could become the currency for AI agents.

The idea is this: as AI starts to proliferate and become part of our daily lives, these AI agents will want to start acquiring currency to achieve their goals, and the easiest way to do this is with native, permissionless digital resources that exist entirely online on your domain.

In fact, if you ask ChatGPT what features it thinks future AI agents will look for in coins, it starts describing cryptocurrencies as including properties like censorship resistance, decentralization, and the ability to use smart contracts.

As this narrative gets louder and louder, and I start to find this idea compelling, let’s take a closer look.

One of the earliest AI/cryptocurrency plays is Fetch, and if my X/Twitter messages are anything to go by, it’s one of the winners in the war for attention between AI currencies. The company initially focused on drone technology before pivoting to AI in 2018. At the time, the Fetch team said its goal was to create “autonomous economic agents” that could pay their own taxes, buy insurance, and enter into legal agreements.

It launched its first layer mainnet in 2020, but its FET token didn’t start to surge until the beginning of this year, when OpenAI and its ilk took off.

According to its website, Fetch.ai is the “first open network of AI agents.” A place where “AI agents can connect, search, and trade to form a dynamic marketplace.” When I contacted Fetch to ask how they use AI in their products, they said their flagship product, DeltaV, is an AI-powered chat interface that leverages written conversations to understand and complete a user’s tasks.

There’s also Render (RNDR), a distributed GPU rendering network where users can rent GPU power. RNDR was initially targeted at artists and studios, but it’s well suited to incorporating AI into storytelling because GPUs are also the hardware needed to power large language models, a type of AI designed to understand and generate human-like language.

While all of these projects are interesting, they look more like products incorporating AI than AI products themselves. As I continued to dig deeper into AI coins, I began to wonder if any tokens fit the narrative of “cryptocurrency for AI” or if the market is just hyping up any token that has anything to do with AI.

Artificial intelligence usually implies the presence of some sort of neural network, and in the case of AI cryptocurrency projects, it’s not clear to me if there’s any real AI at work other than an integration with OpenAI or some form of chatbot.

In the case of Render, the team behind the project doesn’t actually claim to incorporate AI into their product, but rather that their product can be used to power AI, and speculators appear to be combining the two. Who knows, maybe AI wants to be traded in a currency that can also be used to rent the hardware that powers it?

While I believe AI-related tokens have gained traction due to the “AI will use cryptocurrencies” narrative, these tokens haven’t really lived up to the narrative hype, at least not yet. To be fair, who knows what will motivate a future AI agent to use a specific currency?

Will FET, INJ, or another AI token become the currency of future AI agents? That is all yet to be defined. But the rising market cap of most AI-related tokens tells me that crypto investors don’t think that will happen anytime soon. #人工智能  #AI代币