Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — AI systems capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge across any domain at human-level or above — represents the holy grail of AI research. Decentralized AGI proposes building these systems using blockchain-based, distributed infrastructure rather than within closed corporate labs.

The centralized approach to AGI development concentrates enormous power in a handful of companies. Decentralized alternatives aim to ensure that when AGI arrives, it benefits humanity broadly rather than serving narrow corporate interests.

Current AI development is dominated by a few large corporations with access to massive computational resources, proprietary datasets, and top research talent. This concentration raises several concerns:

• Power concentration — A small number of entities control the most capable AI systems
• Lack of transparency — Model architectures and training data are increasingly opaque
• Data exploitation — User data is harvested to train models without fair compensation
• Alignment risks — Corporate incentives may not align with broader societal safety
• Access inequality — Advanced AI capabilities are gated behind expensive API access

Blockchain technology provides several primitives that directly address the challenges of centralized AI:

• Decentralized compute — GPU networks (Render, Akash) distribute training and inference workloads across thousands of providers
• Transparent governance — DAOs can govern AI model deployment, safety protocols, and resource allocation democratically
• Data sovereignty — Protocols like Ocean enable data sharing without exposing raw data, using compute-to-data approaches
• Incentive alignment — Token economics can align researcher, compute provider, and user incentives
• Composability — Open AI services can be combined permissionlessly, like DeFi money legos

Several crypto projects are actively working toward decentralized AGI from different angles:

ASI Alliance — The merger of Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Ocean Protocol creates the most comprehensive decentralized AI stack, combining agents, marketplace, and data infrastructure.

Bittensor (TAO) — Creates an incentivized network for machine learning where models compete to provide intelligence, forming a decentralized neural network.

Internet Computer (ICP) — Provides general-purpose compute infrastructure that can host AI workloads entirely on-chain.

NEAR Protocol — Focuses on chain abstraction and has invested heavily in AI integration with its blockchain infrastructure.

Decentralized AGI faces significant challenges: the compute gap with centralized labs remains vast, coordination across distributed networks is complex, and the path from narrow AI to AGI is uncertain regardless of architecture.

However, the trend toward open-source AI models (Llama, Mistral, etc.) and growing regulatory pressure on AI companies may accelerate adoption of decentralized alternatives. By 2030, decentralized AI infrastructure could capture a meaningful share of the AI compute and data markets, even if AGI itself remains distant.