Many of the people building web3 feel that the traditional web ecosystem has taken advantage of users and their data. While it benefits many businesses, data miners and even AI models, some see it as overkill.
Some of the problems with the web today, which some web3-focused people call Web 2.0, is that it’s centralized, said Tegan Kline, CEO and co-founder of Edge & Node he told TechCrunch’s The Chain Reaction podcast.
“A handful of big companies own and control everything we see online, they own our data and our digital footprint, and they can de-platform us, and so many want to keep our attention and profit from that attention,” Kline said. “It’s not the internet we hoped for in the early days of the web.”
She and others are trying to change that through web3 — and AI integrations. “We’re trying to realize this decentralized internet and give power back to users.”
Edge & Node is a company focused on building and supporting decentralized applications (dApps) and protocols. It is the initial support of the group The chart, a decentralized network that indexes, searches and organizes data. Dubbed the “Google of web3”, it aims to organize open blockchain data and make open data a public good.
The graph has “signatures”, which are like open APIs that serve queries. So, every time a user uses an application built on The Graph, the indexes in the background organize the data and serve the information.
“Web3 is still under construction, we’re still working on creating this decentralized internet that’s resistant to censorship. So innovation is happening today and I think this is where the internet is going to go, this is going to be the next evolution of the internet. It’s a growing industry as opposed to a shrinking industry.”
The chart launched a roadmap for its “New Era” in November to plan how it will use the $50 million increase from last year.
Goals included expanding its data services to reach a larger market, supporting developers, boosting network performance, and building tools for data, simply put. It also included plans to help enable large language models, or LLMs, which are one of the most popular methods for creating conversational AI programs, thanks to OpenAI, Kline noted.
“The one thing that’s really important about artificial intelligence is that it’s all about data,” Kline said. “There’s a saying that he who rules the data rules the world, and so it’s really important that data is not owned and controlled by any one company, especially in the AI space.”
Graph is working to allow users to take data from its network and other blockchains to train AI with that content. “Since we launched The Graph, use cases and data needs have exploded,” said Kline. “There are so many different data needs, and the Graph network will be there to serve all of those needs in a decentralized way for the entrepreneurs and makers in the ecosystem and the users of their apps and projects.”
And for AI, it’s important to train them in a fully open-source way, Kline believes. “And if you even look at open source AIs today, they’re open source in some ways, but the data they’re trained on is not open source.”
As it stands today, the majority of AI is not on the blockchain-train, so to speak, yet. “If you go to a traditional AI conference, they don’t care,” Klein said. “I think the blockchain space is a little bit more interested in AI than the blockchain space.”
There needs to be a little more acceptance in the AI community, but over time, Kline believes the relationship between AI and blockchain will evolve and change. “Using new business models and new incentive structures that have emerged through token economies and decentralized infrastructures, that’s where things will get really interesting for AI.”
This story was inspired by an episode of TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast. Sign up in Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to hear more stories and advice from the entrepreneurs building today’s most innovative companies.
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