News

Fetch.ai: New Paradigm in Using AI

The mainstream of the AI industry is currently focused on developing powerful centralised applications like ChatGPT or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems. However, one project that has taken a radically different approach is Fetch.ai. Instead of centralising AI into one powerful supercomputer, Fetch.ai aims to create decentralised, autonomous, and self-sufficient AI systems that work independently to learn and complete a variety of tasks. Fetch.ai offers a truly unique way of applying AI. In this piece, we are going to have a look at this platform and its novel concept of Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs).

AI as Autonomous Agents

It’s mid-week and you are buried in tasks in your office, thinking which one you should tackle right now – send an email, book an appointment, shop around online for the best subscription rates for your productivity software, or perhaps call your friend with an update about that rendezvous. You quickly realise that you are never going to wrap it all up soon; and another daunting realisation comes along too – you have to prepare that massive report by tomorrow mid-day.

At that moment, you wish you had a small army of assistants who could do it all for you, each one of them tackling their own task. Many professionals, entrepreneurs, and businesses would immediately dismiss that “pipe dream” on the spot. What if you were told that those assistants can come in the form of AI agents, each of whom is an expert in the one task you’d entrust them? This is exactly what Fetch.ai offers – small bits of code based on AI algorithms that act as autonomous agents capable of doing one or a number of sophisticated tasks. These agents could generate, review, and send your emails; book appointments; shop for online products or services; and pay for your parking tickets.

Fetch.ai operates as a decentralised crypto platform that developers can use to launch the so-called Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs) – self-contained AI systems, or perhaps the word mini-systems would suit here, that can perform some tasks they have been trained to do. Businesses and individuals can leverage these AI economic agents, often dubbed “digital twins”, to automate a myriad of time-consuming or complex processes.

Fetch.ai vs OpenAI et al. – New AI Paradigm

It’s worth noting that Fetch.ai isn’t just another AI platform. The project’s core concept represents a drastic departure from mainstream AI. While companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic are focused on creating ever-more-powerful AI super-systems, Fetch.ai aims to decentralise AI code and make it more embedded into the separate processes that govern the functioning of a modern corporation, startup, or individual entrepreneur.

In that sense, Fetch.ai presents a somewhat similar concept to the Internet of Things (IoT). Fetch.ai’s digital twins are akin to embedded IoT systems; both are aiming to spread their functionality and processing power wide.

This offers one critical advantage – significantly lower hardware and processing power requirements. Although ChatGPT, OpenAI’s poster child product, is still in the early stages of its market maturity, problems with slow speeds and bandwidth requirements have already surfaced for users of the generative AI chat tool. To train and operate increasingly more powerful and capable models, OpenAI and similar AI development companies require massive supercomputers, with users accessing their tools from all over the world. The lack of computing power decentralisation in these “classic” AI systems is what is causing this phenomenon.

In contrast, Fetch.ai’s smart economic agents don’t have to rely on centralised servers. The economic agents can live their autonomous lives spread across the world in a fully decentralised way. This is how Fetch.ai can help develop powerful AI agents that don’t require those gigantic servers to operate.

FET Crypto

FET is Fetch.ai’s native on-platform cryptocurrency. Fetch.ai operates as an Ethereum app, so the coin is based on this blockchain’s ERC-20 standard. Paying for services on Fetch.ai and launching AEAs require the use of FET. The coin also has governance functionality – holders of FET can participate in the decision-making process related to any changes or improvements to the platform. Thus, FET isn’t simply a utility token; its governance function makes you, as a token holder, a part of the “owner” community on Fetch.ai; sorry this platform has no specific “security token” to bestow ownership in the classic sense of it, i.e., as understood in regulated financial markets.

In the world of truly decentralised apps, governance tokens probably carry more value for investors than security tokens, assets designed to provide platform ownership rights but whose regulatory status is very feeble outside of the crypto world.

As such, if a crypto investor believes in Fetch.ai’s potential, the optimal way to benefit from the platform’s growth is through an investment in FET. And if you wonder about how FET is doing on the market, the answer is extremely well – the cryptocurrency has posted a 12-month growth rate of 830%. Evidently, the investor community seems to like the idea of autonomous AI agents; what do YOU think of it?