The mystery of innovation in Web3 AI: How to find your own way under the edge of Web2?

Author: Haotian

Some people always think that I criticize web3 AI just one-sidedly optimistic about web2 AI? In fact, this is not the case. Any content I write about web2 DeepSeek, Manus, MCP, etc. does not mean that I am "being favored one and the other". From the first day of shouting for AI+Crypto, I was thinking about how web3 AI innovation should be done, how narratives should evolve, where development problems lie, and how to adjust them. Now, and so in the future. The reason is very simple:

1. I mainly focus on the field of AI + Crypto. I know a little about the innovation and development of web2, but it is not enough to see the overall picture, so I don’t make an absolute evaluation. Like most people, I just know that a series of innovations produced by web2 AI, web3 AI collapsed. After careful research, I found that web2 AI is indeed moving forward steadily in all aspects such as talent echelon, innovative ideas, pragmatism, etc., which is in line with the market’s expectations for the development of AI, that’s all.

I have indeed imagined that it would be great if such innovations appeared in the web3 AI track. There is no need to compete with the web2 team at all. Find a differentiated route and do some unique narratives and technologies in web3. It is enough. At least it is worthy. The previous wave of technical beliefs that buy at the bottom all the way is Holder;

Unfortunately, the expectations were short again and again. Seeing the currency prices of those mainstream projects approaching zero infinitely, and watching the new and old believers cut their losses and leave, I was really angry. I couldn’t keep up with web2 in technological differentiation and innovation, and wouldn’t I be happy to play the narrative hype with web3 expertise?

2. Sitting on Crypto, there is really no AI’s grand mission view as if it were to innovate human technology. From the very beginning, I realized that AI is an opportunity for the Internet, and Crypto also needs this opportunity. The real meaning of AI + Crypto is actually to give AI a new soul to Crypto, so that the "old narratives" that Crypto once hyped up too bubbles are revitalized one by one. We just need to regard AI as a new productivity, Catalyst.

Based on this premise, whether it is the new developer of web2 to enter the market to do AI, or the original web3 old developer who wants to use new narratives to innovate, they should anchor a goal: to use the flexibility and resource advantages of web3's Tokenomis + decentralization to create web3 Native narrative innovation.

web3er must admit that the key to the web2 AI Agent showing its position at this stage is to use "monopoly + scale" to bring a leap forward innovative experience to C-end users. This is an advantage that web3's AI Agent cannot have. Trying to compete head-only in the same field, web3AI is no match at all.

However, it is precisely precise that some upstream distributed framework layers, some distributed trust frameworks and incentive network designs that web2 is unwilling to touch, as well as component designs such as interactive communication chaining outside the Agent computing layer, are the points worthwhile for web3. That is also a point that cannot be avoided when "future AI" develops to a certain stage, and it is also a differentiated advantage of web3AI.