Decentralized AI is a rising narrative in blockchain technology, birthed from the explosive development of Artificial Intelligence. AI has been playing a pivotal role on how people approach automation, convenience, information, and efficiency. While AI serves an ultimate goal of making life easier, there are different models that make using AI even more beneficial to the user.

What is Decentralized AI?

Rather than being managed by a centralized authority, decentralized AI is focused on fragmenting how data is being managed. This not only amplifies a user-centric approach, but also protects all stakeholders from any malicious actors. Here are its benefits:

Fragmented Data: The data in decentralized AI is locally stored in the user's device, allowing the AI to be trained based on the data provided by the user. This not only ensures security for the user, but enhances user experience.

Blockchain Integration: Smart contracts and blockchain platforms manage the coordination of AI training, model sharing, and rewards for participants. Currently, it is possible for a mobile phone to run as a node if the model allows it

Open Source and Distributed Training: Communities, such as DAOs, are able to contribute to AI development with governance mechanisms ensuring fair control and access. These decisions contribute to distributed training, only allowing model changes to be updated to the device.

Why is it better than Centralized AI?

When an application is centralized, it requires the user to have a lot of trust to the entity with the authority while also having a lot of restrictions. This makes it both trust-dependent and permission-filled. Here are a few reasons why Decentralized AI is much better:

Enhanced Privacy: In most cases, your data is being used without your knowledge, and sold to data brokers. This poses significant risk to the user, especially when inputting sensitive information into the AI model

Questionable Security: While centralized, for-profit AI companies have large allocations of funding dedicated towards security, one mishap can cause a domino-effect of catastrophe. Exploited security can lead to mass data leaks, malicious AI response, and breach of user permission.

These are a few examples as to why it’s important for users to realize that they have a choice to opt for a better and safer option. However, the amount of decentralized AI that is available for retail use is scarce. Luckily, users are able to utilize Vana as their decentralized AI option

Vana has one primary goal, to give power back to the people by allowing them to own their data. Vana does this by having  a native support for data pooling via data DAOs, and an EVM-compatible layer 1 blockchain designed specifically for collective ownership of private digital assets—the private data that powers AI in the future. This allows for both incentivization for users through its 16 liquidity pools, and saving data through data ownership on a decentralized AI platform.