Hoskinson: Crypto to Overtake AI in Next 5-10 Years

Cardano's founder Charles Hoskinson predicts that cryptocurrencies will surpass AI in the next five to ten years. He believes this is because blockchains can solve problems that AI currently cannot, such as payments, alignment, and data provenance.

Hoskinson specifically mentioned that OpenAI and Anthropic will have to become profitable at scale, arguing that individual models can make money but pre-training is what 'kills them.'

He also stated that the current data center buildout is unsustainable, citing the issue of electricity supply. Hoskinson compared this boom to the 1990s fiber market, where about 90% of newly laid cable sat dark and demand took roughly ten years to catch up.

In his vision for the future, he expects 'dark data centers,' then a shift to local/edge models and distributed grid compute. He cited examples such as Apple's M5 Mac Studio targeting 400-500 billion parameter models with 512 GB of RAM, around a $20,000 price point today, and Nvidia Spark boxes at about $4,000.

Hoskinson believes that the only coordinating layer for pooling GPUs, phones, and other devices into that grid is crypto. He also forecasted that by the end of 2030, there will be $10 trillion of assets on public blockchains and a billion new users.