Filecoin as the Infrastructure for Decentralized AI

Today, Fast Company featured the Filecoin Network in its fourth annual Next Big Things in Tech list, honoring emerging technology that has a profound impact on industries—from education and sustainability to robotics and artificial intelligence.

This year, 138 technologies developed by established companies, startups, or research teams are featured for their potential to revolutionize the lives of consumers, businesses, and society overall. The Filecoin Network was recognized as a key piece of internet infrastructure powering decentralized artificial intelligence.

How Filecoin is Shaping the Future of AI 

As the AI industry rapidly expands – now valued at $9 trillion according to the latest State of AI Report – Filecoin’s decentralized storage network offers an open-source alternative for data storage.

Decentralization and Resilience: The integrity of AI hinges on transparency in its development and data use, making decentralization essential for a more resilient, trustworthy digital future. Yet, today’s internet landscape is dominated by centralization, with a handful of corporations controlling the majority of global cloud data. This concentration of power leaves the web fragile, exposing information to single points of failure such as outages, blackouts, and takedowns. Now, AI risks following the same path, as major developers increasingly lock down their code and data.

Filecoin offers a compelling alternative to these centralized models by enabling decentralized, transparent data storage, and fostering trust while reinforcing the resilience of our digital infrastructure.

Immutability and Provenance: An AI model’s accuracy and credibility are rooted in the integrity of the data that it’s built on. To promote a safe, transparent, and trustworthy environment for AI to flourish, it is critical to consider where those massive troves of data originate, how and where they are stored, who can access them for the long term, and how AI models leverage this data. The Filecoin network is uniquely positioned to address these challenges by enabling decentralization and transparency, creating an auditable and tamper-proof way for AI projects to verify their models, datasets, and computations.

Flexibility and Scale: Additionally, at a time when tech giants are investing billions in additional storage infrastructure to account for growing market demand, Filecoin is designed to scale—built to accommodate storage in the petabyte or even exbibyte level—and at the forefront of enabling decentralized compute.

The Filecoin network is the backbone for a better version of the web. Data storage is what enables the internet to function and underpins the credibility and integrity of AI systems. Read more about How Decentralized AI and Data Storage Are Building Trust in AI.

A Look at How AI Organizations Are Leveraging Filecoin 

Filecoin Foundation recently announced collaborations with SingularityNET, Theoriq, Bagel, Nuklai, and Aethir, each highlighting the versatility of the Filecoin network as decentralized AI infrastructure. The Filecoin network’s decentralized infrastructure provides the foundational layer that enables AI applications to scale efficiently, securely, and transparently.

• SingularityNET: SingularityNET and FF are collaborating to store metadata on Filecoin via Lighthouse, enhancing the security and provenance of decentralized data storage.
• Theoriq: FF and Theoriq are developing AI agents trained on open datasets stored on Filecoin, including a current project enabling natural language queries for Filecoin docs and a proposed project leveraging declassified CIA datasets for efficient and verifiable research.
• Bagel: In collaboration with Bagel, FF is enabling AI developers to train and store models using Filecoin’s decentralized compute and storage network, optimizing resource utilization for machine learning workloads and driving the adoption of decentralized infrastructure.
• Nuklai: Nuklai has integrated Filecoin to make metadata publicly accessible and is exploring Filecoin as a core storage cluster for enterprise use cases, offering secure, perpetual, and decentralized data storage.
• Aethir: Aethir and FF are collaborating to address GPU scarcity and enhance AI-driven data security. Aethir announced support for the Filecoin network, offering advanced GPU leasing capabilities to improve data processing and storage efficiency.

“The Next Big Things in Tech provides a fascinating glimpse at near- and long-term technological breakthroughs across a variety of sectors,” says Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Spanning everything from semiconductors to agricultural gene editing, the companies featured in this year’s list are tackling some of the world’s most pressing and vexing problems.”

About Fast Company

Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. The editor-in-chief is Brendan Vaughan. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with our sister publication, Inc., and can be found online at fastcompany.com.