The AI Uprising: Will Ambient Replace Bitcoin?

by

The AI Uprising: Will Ambient Replace Bitcoin? 🤖💸

The AI Uprising: Will Ambient Replace Bitcoin?

What to know:

  • Ambient raised $7.2 million in seed funding from a16z’s crypto accelerator program and Delphi Digital
  • The chain aims to deliver super-intelligent AI quickly, cheaply, and openly.

And so, the prophecy begins: a new artificial intelligence-infused blockchain, Ambient, has emerged from the depths of the crypto underworld, backed by the mighty Andreessen Horowitz. Its co-founder, Travis Good, has proclaimed that Ambient is “ultimately designed as a replacement for Bitcoin.” Ah, the hubris!

But what’s behind this far-fetched claim? Good predicts that Bitcoin’s encryption mechanisms will soon be as stale as yesterday’s bread, and that the miners behind it will be left wondering where to go. The answer, of course, is Ambient.

“You’ve got people who’ve invested billions of dollars in hash power for securing a network in ASICs,” Good quipped at this year’s ethDenver conference. “And the question is like, where do they all go?” Ah, the existential crisis of the miners!

Ambient, you see, is a blockchain with deep capabilities in the AI space – the “future economy,” as Good puts it. It’s like a decentralized competitor to OpenAI, but with a twist. The network operates on a proof-of-work mechanism, familiar to Bitcoin miners, making it an easy switch.

“It’s a useful proof of work network, which we don’t think anyone has ever done well in crypto,” Good said, with a hint of sarcasm.

Many crypto projects have attempted to fuse the two buzzy tech trends, blockchains and decentralized crowdsourcing, to steer AI towards delivering for humanity. But Good claims that Bittensor, the market leader, is woefully deficient because it doesn’t actually run AI models on blockchain. Ah, the irony!

Whether Bitcoin miners – let alone users – would actually embrace a radically new and different network likely hinges on Ambient’s economic success. Good seeks for Ambient to deliver super-intelligent AI fast, cheap, and critically, in the open, so that users get the answers they paid for.

While Ambient’s security rhymes with Bitcoin’s, the network itself runs like Solana. Ah, the familiar tune!

Ambient raised $7.2 million in seed funding from a16z’s crypto accelerator program as well as Delphi Digital, one of the VC world’s hungriest funds for crypto-AI crossover tech.

“Everyone in crypto is currently using centralized AI to power their apps, to power their frontend,” said Alex Golding, a venture associate at Delphi. He thinks that’s a big issue because it deprives users of understanding what the models are trained on and exposes them to getting hoodwinked with answers derived from inferior models.

“Verified inference” by miners acts as a provenance fact-checker, ensuring that answers spat out by Ambient originate from the model people paid to use.

“If you don’t have verified inference, you’re guaranteed to get rugged,” Good said, adding a hyperbolic warning: “Nation state actors are going to poison your model and just do fun stuff, like we saw with Lazarus,” North Korea’s hackers.

Read More

2025-03-31 19:19