The Web Laptop , a blockchain undertaking that has sought to distinguish itself from rivals, is doubling down on its pitch because the go-to community for on-chain synthetic intelligence (AI).
This could possibly be the start of a brand new tech stack – one through which AI, not people, turns into the first developer of purposes, based on Dominic Williams, founding father of Web Laptop developer Dfinity.
Williams argued that whereas crypto costs stay pushed largely by market mechanics – treasury operations, liquidity video games and hypothesis – the underlying expertise will finally drive a reckoning in an interview with CoinDesk.
“In the long term, markets start to replicate realities on the bottom,” he mentioned. “However as but you’re not seeing what’s occurring with Web Laptop mirrored in ICP’s worth.”
Working AI on-Chain
The Web Laptop first demonstrated neural networks operating as sensible contracts in April final 12 months, beginning with picture classification and later facial recognition, Williams mentioned.
Whereas these have been comparatively easy fashions in comparison with giant language fashions – the type that energy AI instruments like ChatGPT and Gemini – they have been proof of idea: that AI can run natively on a blockchain. No different community has achieved this, Williams identified, regardless of the chatter about “decentralized AI.”
The place others depend on off-chain infrastructure like Amazon Internet Companies, ICP seeks to combine the total AI improvement and execution stack on-chain. Williams describes this as “a self-writing web” – a system the place customers describe what they need, and an AI delivers it as a working utility, hosted instantly on Web Laptop.
The larger thought, Williams mentioned, is that AI itself will change a lot of as we speak’s developer workflow. As an alternative of people writing code, configuring databases and sustaining servers, an AI may spin up purposes immediately, replace them constantly and guarantee resilience via blockchain-based ensures.
This reframes the blockchain not simply as a settlement layer for tokens, however because the optimum surroundings for AI-generated purposes. ICP’s design, with options like “reverse fuel” – the mannequin the place builders pay for the computational prices of their purposes, relatively than requiring finish customers to pay a transaction payment – removes the necessity for firewalls or database migrations that plague conventional infrastructure.
“AI is growing these apps tons of of occasions quicker than people may,” Williams mentioned. “And since there aren’t any system admins standing by, you want the guardrails solely blockchain can present.”
Williams pointed to early hackathons the place bizarre folks used AI on ICP to construct apps: from a crowdsourced pothole-mapping platform, to a instrument for producing wills and well being directives.
The imaginative and prescient is that such instruments may proliferate within the thousands and thousands. Entrepreneurs, small companies and even NGOs may create custom-made apps with out technical experience, paying for utilization with fiat whereas crypto tokens underpin the system behind the scenes.
Value Motion Nonetheless Lagging
Regardless of these developments, the ICP token has but to see sustained momentum. It briefly rallied when AI integrations have been introduced final 12 months, however has since traded extra according to broader market sentiment than with person adoption.
Williams accepts this disconnect however predicts that markets might catch up very quickly.
“This could possibly be the primary time Web3 truly outcompetes Web2 technologically, with out a token incentive in sight,” Williams mentioned. “The shock will likely be when folks understand they’ll simply speak to an AI, and a blockchain app seems at a URL.”
