How AI Is Supercharging Decentralized Computing Projects Akash and Livepeer

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Artificial intelligence asserted itself as one of the dominant interests on Wall Street this year, as the release of Open AI’s ChatGPT sparked a frenzy for new use cases of the tech.

As investors contemplated which firms could capitalize on an AI boom, NVIDIA emerged as a publicly traded darling. The chipmaker’s stock price has surged nearly 225% since January, muscling its market cap past a trillion dollars.

Within the crypto world, certain projects are vying for space in a market where computational resources are increasingly scarce. Overclock Labs Founder Greg Osuri said Akash, as a decentralized cloud computing marketplace, has offered access to high-density GPUs, like the A100 or H100, which are essential for machine learning.

“We've been around for about four years, and now we're seeing an incredible uptick in usage with the AI boom,” Osuri said of Akash. “That's a large market.”

According to CoinGecko, Akash’s AKT token has increased around 550% over the past year, rising to $1.65 from $0.25. Still, the token is down 80% from its all-time high of $8.07 in April 2021. While the project has increasingly embraced AI-friendly forms of computing, it’s also been a digital testing ground for users running unique experiments.

“We saw for the first time a foundational model being completely trained on a decentralized network,” he said. “The popular belief is foundational networks need low latency GPUs in order to be trained, and decentralization doesn't necessarily provide that low latency, [...] but that has been disproved.”

Since giving Akash users the ability to access high-end GPUs, Osuri said users are spending more on the marketplace. Akash saw users spend just $70 a day on computational resources before, but that’s ballooned to around $2,000, he said, describing the shift as “a pretty intense jump.”

Meanwhile, Livepeer CEO and Founder Doug Petkanics said that the video infrastructure network is excited about artificial intelligence as well. He’s noticed “momentum around some of the more advanced things” built among Livepeer’s users.

Whether it’s automatically generating captions for videos, screening for adult content, or having AI identify products, Petkanics said that the technology dovetails well with the needs of certain developers in the video on-demand and streaming space. 

Having established an on-chain treasury this year, he hopes Livepeer’s community can submit proposals to receive grants that lay the groundwork for some of these features.

“There's been a lot of R&D efforts to map these onto the network,” he said. “Looking forward at our roadmap, it's all about enhancing [and] adding these exciting capabilities.”

The current pace of growth in the video streaming space is so intense that traditional cloud infrastructures can barely keep up, Petkanics said. Noting that video streaming is worth $200 billion, he said the industry is ripe for disruption because of the current rates that cloud providers charge, which average about $3 per hour of ingested video stream.

“If you want to do live video streaming, you need servers that are provisioned that are standing by idle all around the world in order to ingest video [and] deliver it close to where people are,” he said. “And having that like idle, unused capacity standing by is very expensive.”

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