After hustling all day, I finally got a breather and suddenly figured out a question that’s been bothering me for three years—

Why haven’t I been impressed by any of the AI+Crypto projects that have popped up in recent years? I finally worked it out: these people haven’t broken out of the Web2 playbook at all—they’re just pouring old wine into a new Web3 bottle.

True disruptive innovation isn’t as simple as just throwing an AI model onto the blockchain. The key is solving the trust problem. In the past, it was “I choose to trust the answer AI gives me.” In the future, it should be “I can use cryptography and mathematics to rigorously prove this answer is reliable.”

That’s the path we should be taking.