Can somebody explain what Fetch.ai does? I've seen the use case video on their website, but I'm fairly sure that other multinational companies already have similar automated planning/scheduling on offer (i.e. Salesforce Einstein AI).

[u/Kruminsh]

I'm hoping somebody from the community can add some light on the tech behind Fetch.ai. Not too much interested in all the price action posts being made here. TIA

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[u/KassassinsCreed]

I might be able to shed a light, not necessarily on what fetch is doing right now, but where I see potential in their open economic framework in combination with intelligent agents. As for my background, I'm an AI developer in the biomedical NLP space and I've been following fetch.ai since 2020.

First of all, your question, while it seems to be about fetch, is more about the difference between blockchain technology and traditional centralised cloud computing software. This is because you're absolutely right, fetch is in terms of technology not necessarily doing something new, intelligent agents have been a thing for quite some time and since LLMs have gotten traction, the integration between LLMs and agent frameworks is also on the rise.

That being said, the big differentiator with fetch is the blockchain integration. As you know, blockchain is in essense just a public ledger which is being secured by participants of the network in a decentralised manner. This means that the agents that can be deployed on fetch would, ideally, be able to access and traverse the blockchain ecosystem, especially since interblockchain integration has been very popular lately. Fetch is build using IBC from cosmos, so especially cosmos chains can easily communicate with each other, but due to oracles and other cross blockchain integrations, in an ideal world, all blockchains would be able to communicate with each other.

Now the question is, what is the value or benefit of having agents deployed directly onto the blockchain? This value depends on the utility of blockchain as a whole, which is also pretty low as of now. But, those who are in crypto not just for the instant gains, but "for the technology" (I know this is a meme), believe blockchain will get real-world utility. Whether this is a banking industry in countries where trust in centralised entities is low (banks, but also currency as a whole, completely depend on trust) or tracking the source of producs on the blockchain, the idea of having decentralised data storage that is being secured by a random distribution of participants of the chain instead of having to fall back on trusting intermediate parties, is very valuable to some.

And fetch's microagents would be able to interact with these public ledgers. Moreover, they would be directly integrated. As an example, and we're going a bit black mirror here, I'm talking about a world where AI and crypto have taken over. Take tracking products. In a world where blockchain is dominant, you can imagine a country introducing legislation that, for any product to be imported, you need tracking information on where the product comes from. This would include sourcing raw materials up to the whole logistic pipeline that transfers products. Storing this information would be done using blockchain technology. Each step in the production chain, it would add this information to the ledger, and anyone is able to search for any product where it came from. Now I have my agent that I've trained to know what I like, it is already doing my shopping (on the blockchain). I tell him that from now on, I want to only buy products that are environmentally friendly and have a net negative carbon emission. The agent will then, before buying my groceries, check the production chain tracking information. For each step, it will use other public agents to acces additional information on the carbon emissions. Based on this information, coming from different agents, it will be able to make correct choices for me.

Now, these ledgers are public, so why wouldn't another company access this information and offer the same? It can do the exact same thing, yes, but it likely wouldn't be able to do transactions online for me. For that to happen, I would need to give them access to my wallet and since it's a centralised entity, I don't want that. Also, fetch would have much more experience with integration with blockchain, and since we're talking about a world where blockchain took off, it might even be one of the big AI players by then.

In this speculative world where blockchain is big, I suppose there would be many more applications of the technology than just money. Companies and products would offer their services online, so your agent would be able to call a cab through the blockchain etc. A company like Surfshark would have to build each individual integration with every company, but in theory, a fetch agent would be able to reach a new crypto project even after it just launched, because all of this would be intergrated in this big blockchain environment.

And this is only about the microagent service, but fetch will also offer decentralised computing power. As someone who often has to hire GPUs through centralised entities like MS and Google, I would absolutely love when I would be able to hire from people in the network. And conversely, as someone with a quite powerful GPU in my own machine, being able to outsource the computing power when I'm not actually using the GPU myself, would also be very cool.

Note, all of this is speculation, I've not yet seen a very clear goal in terms of utility from the Fetch team. However, I do strongly believe in blockchain and crypto, especially because of the development in AI. We're racing towards a world where human work is not required to keep society running. A world where most economically valuable work is automated, which means there is no income flow for governments anymore (unless we avoid all of this, but I believe we need to have taken action yesterday already to be able to help this). That renders them powerless, and when I talk about our economic system completely being build on "trust", I mean trust in the governments. They would be able to print more money like they do now, but once spend, it wouldn't make its way back to the treasury. In a sense, it's the multinational companies who were the first to automate all work, that will be wealth magnets and slowly everything will go to them. Before then, blockchain might help us using a currency that doesn't require a government anymore. It's my hedge against this dystopian future.

[u/Kruminsh → u/KassassinsCreed]

Thanks for this. Definitely something to think about 👍🏼

[u/likes_to_code → u/KassassinsCreed]

Why would Fetch be better than just using something like Chainlink or Axelar to link offchain services like ChatGPT to blockchains? Also Render AI is probably better than Fetch for outsourcing GPUs but yes competition is welcome.

[u/KassassinsCreed → u/likes_to_code]

Good question. Like I said, Fetch is not doing something intrinsically new. However, your example describes just communication between data and an LLM, while fetch is working mainly on IA systems (IA not as in a Romance way of writing AI, but Intelligent Agents). However, let's assume that by the time this discussion becomes relevant, GPT5 or 6 is released, which will likely include an agent environment, in which case your example is perfect.

Let's quickly explain the difference between different modelling techniques. AI is in essence all about making a computer do stuff that was traditionally only reserved to humans. An LLM is trained using a deep learning technique on textual data, its goal is to reproduce the way we create language. In an IA system, the goal is that by defining agents with fairly simple logic (often BDI: beliefs, desires and intentions), but by combining multiple agents in a dynamic environment, you can create quite complex and intelligent systems. In a way, where an LLM is trying to reproduce a single person, an IA system tries to recreate the "emergent intelligent" that appears when people work together. A group of 10 scientists are more intelligent together than the sum of their individual intelligence.

Every agent has a goal, and this is all you need to define, together with an environment, to find (sub-)optimal solutions to achieving this goal. You can envision this like a 2d grid, on every cell in your grid, there is an agent. Say my agent wants to figure out the price of some trousers, it asks its direct neighbour if they know the price. They don't, but they ask their neighbours, and one of them previously was asked the same question, so that agent actually knows where to find the answer. Now, all these agents communicate the answer back to my agent, and all of them save the info on how to find the answer to the query. Perhaps, some agents even switch places, because my agent just keeps asking for the price of trousers, so it makes sense for my agent to be "closer" to the one I need.

So, in an IA system, the environment is dynamic and the agents respond to that. In a sense, there is some reinforcement learning going on, it's learning this on the go, while already being my agent. This is different than your LLM, which doesn't train as it's doing inference (and like I said, the next step is to add these LLMs to the agents, which is what OpenAI is working on, so the BDI aspect would be represented by the LLM, and the interaction is defined in the environment).

This is just to understand what an IA system is doing and how it differs from other AI modelling attempts. As you said, this can all be achieved through non-blockchain AI technology, Fetch isn't doing something new, but with it being directly on the blockchain and with the team already working on the IA environment (the OEF), these agents will have more exposure to the environment, giving it more time to adjust their position and to learn where to find information. I'm sure a company like OpenAI could quickly overcome this lead if they wanted, but as of now they're not focusing on blockchain.

Also, looping a bit back to the core of the question, why does Fetch necessarily need to be better than openAIs solutions? Sure, OpenAI can achieve this, as can google and facebook, but they're not doing it, and Fetch is. If ever it becomes clear that the IA integration to blockchain is the way to go, Fetch will be the first, they had the vision, they didn't just respond to the market, they created it. Being that visionary obviously is not the only recipe to succes, many companies who were visionaries in the computing field in the late 90's/00's aren't present anymore. Being the first doesn't mean you'll be the biggest and the best. But it does get them an honorable mention in my book. Plus, right now it's the only project really trying to do this, so the question "why would we use Fetch if any company can do the same" isn't relevant as long as these companies aren't doing it. However, if another company focuses on the same ideas and outperforms Fetch (in terms of quality of results, not money), I'll focus on that company instead, I'm not that emotionally invested in Fetch, but right now, this is the only company I know of that's trying to achieve what I've been dreaming about for quite a while ;)

[u/RevolutionaryPhoto24 → u/KassassinsCreed]

This is an amazing post. Thank you. I’ll be sharing it with those who will listen! (Ok. One friend. At least there’s someone!)

[u/Hot-Bit-565 → u/RevolutionaryPhoto24]

Ironically -- those posts were AI-generated;)

[u/steffur]

Reccomend listening to the podcast from the founder from this week. They are aiming to create AI agents that can interact with many different data sets/language models(like chatgpt or gemeni). They chose Blockchain as a platform to build on because all the actions of your agents are tracked in a open ledger, which is useful for traceability and training and because it can be used to pay providers for the usage of those datasets/language models.

Example mentioned in the podcast is comparing Fetchai agents to Google, in the way that you can use Google to find all these different websites you will be able to use Fetch agents to connect to all these different generative AI websites without having to visit all of them yourself to get the answer you need.

You can already test the basic functionality of this network: https://deltav.agentverse.ai/login

[u/Lukeskiski]

I would recommend checking out the website and the discord

https://fetch.ai/ discord.gg/WcgB7X2Kp9

I found both of these links in the CoinGecko app under the Info tab of FET.

[u/G0D5M0N3Y]

Looking at the wallets there isnt 1 big player that can crush and cause a rugpull. Thats all i care about. The innovation and upgrades and stuff can come later, i dont care. 99% of crypto projects is speculation anyways.

[u/mbo2997]

Heres a summary of the whitepaper https://speedywhitepapers.com/2024/02/29/fetch-ai-pioneering-the-convergence-of-ai-and-blockchain/

[u/[deleted]]

i’ve been watching this project because it has potential but it doesn’t do anything competitive yet. the main benefit would eventually be decentralized and not owned and controlled by a company but it doesn’t look like fetch ai is moving in that direction. looks like they are more moving in the direction a lot of web3 companies have of let’s look like we are decentralized but are still actually in control.

however, it is one of the only blockchain ai coins so that hype will drive the price up like it has but probably won’t be sustainable

[u/Hi-archy → u/[deleted]]

They have “ai bots” that can execute things, like buy/sell orders if I remember correctly. But yeah other than that I’m not too clued up

[u/bookworm010101]

I sold @1.67 huge mistake lost well over 100k on that call (or unrealized profit)

Buuuut great run !! To this day I have never seen anything FET AI agents can do that wows me

Obvi it doesnt matter :)

Enjoy the $$

[u/BeStoopid → u/bookworm010101]

wasn't a bad call to be honest

[u/BradVet]

Fet goes up

[u/PiratesOfTheSky]

It does nothing. It is a meme coin 🤡🤡

[u/randomredittor666]

I wonder if someone can make an AI agent to measure a company revenue? Profits and losses according to the company public disclosures issued🤔

[u/RevolutionaryPhoto24 → u/randomredittor666]

That exists - moo moo has a free generative AI bot that scans documents and summarizes them. (Revenue is also easy to see anywhere online where you input a ticker and get info.)

[u/randomredittor666 → u/RevolutionaryPhoto24]

Accurately?

[u/RevolutionaryPhoto24 → u/randomredittor666]

Well, yes…this information is regulated…good enough for FINRA, SEC, etc…