Hoskinson Predicts Blockchain Will 'Eat' AI Within Five Years

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson predicts that blockchain technology will eventually absorb artificial intelligence (AI), similar to how cryptocurrency absorbed cryptography as a discipline. He bases this prediction on his observation of unsustainable data center spending, which is growing tenfold year over year but cannot scale at the same pace.

Hoskinson points out that AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic need to turn a profit eventually, but their enormous costs of pretraining new models are narrowing their path to profitability. He draws a parallel to his own career in cryptocurrency, where cryptographers initially resisted association with crypto until it became powerful enough to hire away the field's best talent.

Hoskinson expects AI to follow a similar arc within five to ten years, citing payments, alignment, and data provenance as specific gaps that blockchains can fill. He argues that cryptocurrencies will 'eat' AI because they solve these hard problems that AI cannot solve.