Opinion by: Matt Wright, Co-founder and CEO of Gaia
In the mid-1400s, Gutenberg’s press removed the monopoly of written knowledge. Literacy expanded, institutions changed, and the public finally gained the opportunity to lock in the ideas behind elite control.
Today, decentralized artificial intelligence (DEAI) triggers a similar shift by expanding access to intelligence and reshaping it.
The decentralization of AI challenges the main structure of today’s AI. Most platforms operate as closed systems. Model weights are hidden, data pipelines are proprietary, and decisions occur behind the API. The control enables a few companies to determine how intelligence develops and who can use it.
DEAI reduces dependency and changes the way intelligence is created, controlled and distributed.
Hidden cost of shutting down AI platforms
The closed nature of centralized AI systems creates bottlenecks due to limited access, which in turn leads to a narrow worldview. In recorded cases, centralized technology has produced biased decisions, opaque outcomes and wrongful arrests. These risks stem from centralized control over input, design and data.
Even the central AI company’s goals are developing under pressure. 2025, OpenAi The scrapped plan becomes a fully profitable entity and reorganize its commercial sector into a public welfare company controlled by its nonprofit parents. While the move shows that public interest remains a priority, it also reveals how fragile commitments related to corporate governance can be.
DEAI completely eliminates this dependency. It incorporates the public interest into the architecture by designing it into the way the system works.
DEAI is already changing the community and market
DEAI developers can run models locally, fine-tune them on regional data, and adapt them to specific constraints. These tools do not depend on bandwidth, commercial licensing or company approval. They run where centralized tools usually cannot.
Farmers in India use voice assistants trained in local dialects to plan crop cycles. In Sierra Leone, teachers use AI chatbots through low data delivery applications to get more accurate and cost-effective real-time course support than traditional web searches. In rural Guatemala, midwives use AI-powered smartphone apps to monitor fetal health during home visits, enabling real-time assessments without internet access and improving maternal care in low-resource environments.
All these projects were created by humans using them – those historically excluded from global technological developments.
Now, it’s easier than ever to build an AI agent. Tutorials show how to create a functional AI proxy without encoding. For more technical users, the platform provides code-based and visual development tools. The barrier to entry was significantly lower.
Related: Concentrated AI threatens democratic digital future
The company followed suit. Retailers train small models on transaction data to improve logistics. Enterprise customizes open weight models for internal operations. According to Dappradar, the decentralized AI application is Get market share quickly Enough to challenge Defi and games in Web3.
DEAI has reshape the way people work, learn and solve problems in their communities. With each implementation, intelligence becomes less abstract, more applicable, more positional, and more localized.
New ideological divide in AI
The most common criticism of DEAI is that decentralization can lead to inconsistencies or misinformation. These questions are not new. When news about Gutenberg emerged, critics warned of unverified texts and social barriers. However, the long-term outcome is scientific advancement, literacy and wider participation in public discourse.
Transparent system supports supervision. Open models can be checked. Community norms can be managed locally. Moral control can develop in openness, not determined by a set of corporate values.
This difference reflects a wider ideological division in the AI community. Human CEO Dario Amodei advocates a centralized approach to security-centricity prose“The machine of love for grace.” He believes that responsible AGI requires strict control of development.
On the other hand, SingularityNet founder Ben Goertzel warned that concentrated AGI development has the potential to strengthen its creators’ narrow worldview. In the nearest one interviewhe called on intelligence to stand out from global cooperation and local adaptations.
These positions affect incentives, risk models and global visits. Centralized systems prioritize uniformity and control. A decentralized system allows intelligence to evolve across different cultures, industries and use cases. This flexibility is already shaping new markets and new institutions.
DEAI restores the original Renaissance spirit
Who will participate in the next stage of AI? The more intelligence is moved to the public, the more durable it is, adaptable and representative. Developers are moving away from closed APIs, public institutions are investing in sovereign infrastructure, and community-built models appear where large-scale technical tools are limited. Intelligence is no longer built just for the world, it is built from it.
We are still in this transition and what happens next depends on our construction. This means investing in a decentralized infrastructure, funding local projects, and most importantly creating tools to shape intelligence that is as easy to use as read and write tools.
The first Renaissance expanded the people who could read. This will expand who can think, calculate and build – everywhere.
Opinion by: Matt Wright, Co-founder and CEO of Gaia.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be considered legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent Cointelegraph’s views and opinions.
