Crypto sleeps while AI builds the richest data set monopolies

Crypto debates DeFi forks while AI companies lock trillions of tokens into proprietary training runs, building permanent data set monopolies. The window closes fast.

Opinion by: Ram Kumar, core contributor at OpenLedger

The crypto industry spent a decade evangelizing decentralization. At the same time, AI companies assembled the most valuable monopolies since Standard Oil, and they’re data monopolies that make protocol dominance look trivial by comparison. The AI industry is expected to generate over $300 billion in revenue by 2025, primarily through training models on trillions of tokens scraped from researchers, writers and domain experts. 

Bitcoin maxis fought block size wars. Ethereum debated MEV extraction. Meanwhile, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic scraped the entire corpus of human knowledge, locked it inside proprietary training runs and built moats that no amount of capital or talent can overcome.

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