Why Privacy Is Key to an AI-Powered Decentralized Web

by
Victoria d’Este

Printed: February 03, 2025 at 12:27 pm Up to date: February 03, 2025 at 12:28 pm

by Ana

Edited and fact-checked:
February 03, 2025 at 12:27 pm

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AI will utterly change each space of our existence, beginning with revolutionizing our on-line lives. At the moment, most of our digital actions revolve round Web2 providers, that are extremely centralized, inherently permissioned, and deeply controlling. Put one other approach, they’re run by big tech companies with unfavorable ‘phrases and situations’ designed to aggressively harvest our private data for revenue. Whereas these apps are “free” to customers, there are hidden prices by way of our information and probably wider freedoms.

Within the coming period of AI, this mannequin dangers turning into terrifyingly exploitative if energy stays with tech giants. On this article, we argue that the way forward for AI should be related to Web3. This pathway affords a permissionless model of the net, based mostly on decentralized applied sciences like blockchain, the place person information is protected and their rights preserved.

With the intention to facilitate the supply of AI-powered Web3, we’d like a sturdy, scalable privateness layer. With out this, we will be unable to adequately defend customers as they go about their enterprise on-chain. With this in thoughts, COTI has developed a light-weight and versatile resolution for decentralized confidential computing (DeCC) that may permit customers to retain full management of their private information– even on-chain and with permissioned entry, match for the oncoming period of AI & Web3.

So, What Does the Decentralized Internet Look Like?: From Search To Brokers

ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and different chatbots are already taking up from serps like Google. These are examples of AI brokers – autonomous or semi-autonomous applications able to analyzing inputs and data and making reasoned selections. As a substitute of returning an inventory of related pages, ChatGPT can assimilate all the info it finds and supply a single, useful consequence. It takes the uncooked search outcomes and does the job of filtering and synthesizing them, a job that we’d as soon as have achieved ourselves, solely way more shortly and effectively. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has mentioned: “AI brokers will remodel the way in which we work together with know-how, making it extra pure and intuitive.” 

Brokers are quick changing old-style internet searches and far else in addition to serving to customers entry every kind of providers successfully. To take action, they’ll accumulate massive quantities of non-public and “intent” information: data that alerts what customers are interested by and what they could do. That information constitutes a really priceless useful resource to corporations and organizations of every kind. Nevertheless, it additionally poses a threat to customers.

Since brokers are autonomous, their capabilities are maximized when they’re able to change data between themselves, which might embody the change of worth. That turns into very tough with an ordinary Web2 mannequin since TradFi is just not structured to allow automated funds by non-human entities – particularly not micropayments and particularly not worldwide funds. 

For Web3, it’s utterly totally different. Sensible contracts would be the native and default approach that brokers do enterprise. Customers will signal as much as and interface with Web3 providers utilizing good contracts by way of their AI brokers. Funds will essentially use cryptocurrency because it integrates seamlessly with good contracts and permits permissionless, borderless, programmable transactions of any dimension. 

The Agent Economic system Runs On Web3

Think about a world – coming quickly – through which customers have their very own private AI brokers, which maintain information representing a wealthy profile of their circumstances and intent. Primarily, that is the digital illustration of “you”. These brokers will perform numerous duties, from work and leisure actions to e-commerce. As a result of brokers can have a lot details about customers and since their algorithms are so highly effective, they’ll be capable of counsel options that customers had by no means even thought-about themselves.

Customers will be capable of grant different brokers permission to work together with their information and permit their very own brokers to hold out numerous duties. Wish to guide the right vacation? Your agent will share your pursuits, preferences, price range, availability, and dozens of different variables to make tailor-made strategies. Focused on sure funding alternatives? Your agent will search the marketplace for belongings that meet your most popular standards, rank them by way of threat, and make strategies for the way to construction your portfolio. On the lookout for a brand new job? Your agent can assimilate all open alternatives throughout the entire market to discover a shortlist of superb choices centered in your talent set, expertise, location, wage expectations, and extra.

The brand new Web3 financial system is already forming from many various “tribes” of customers, organizing social media into curiosity teams – for work, gaming, commerce, and different actions. Customers and brokers will be capable of pay and earn in crypto, with engagement being gamified and monetized to the diploma that Web2 customers can barely think about at this time. 

Unlocking AI in Web3 And Avoiding Dystopia

When you’re aware of present Web3 providers, you’ll know that this isn’t an unrealistic imaginative and prescient of the long run. The shift has already began, with community-run apps based mostly on blockchain attracting massive numbers of customers and AI enjoying an more and more necessary function. A fantastic instance is PriveX, the intent-based perp-DEX, or NFA, a social buying and selling app that aggregates a lot of social media feeds and group alerts and affords AI-curated funding strategies.

Nevertheless, all through all this, privateness is an important lacking piece. Brokers must entry and course of customers’ data with out compromising it, because the penalties of giving highly effective AI free rein on our private information at scale are unthinkable. Brokers want to have the ability to work together with person information in encrypted kind, finishing up machine studying operations with out getting access to the “plaintext”.

There may be a couple of method to decentralized confidential computing, however that is the place COTI’s know-how shines. Primarily based on garbled circuits – cryptographic protocols that securely compute capabilities on encrypted information – COTI’s Privateness-on-Demand resolution affords an easy and environment friendly layer or wrapper for transactions and processes of every kind.

The promise of Web3 is that it’ll place management again into our arms. That is the very best and arguably solely future we will permit for AI: A decentralized community of interconnected brokers that ensures customers’ self-sovereignty, safeguarding their private data at each step. Their information should be theirs alone and can’t be offered or utilized in any approach with out their categorical permission. 

That is how we transfer from a corporate-controlled Web2 that extracts worth from customers to a decentralized AI-powered Web3 that enables customers to construct worth collectively and stay self-sovereign – safely, successfully, and pretty.

About The Creator

Victoria is a author on quite a lot of know-how subjects together with Web3.0, AI and cryptocurrencies. Her intensive expertise permits her to jot down insightful articles for the broader viewers.

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Victoria d’Este