On December 1, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, sparking global attention on AI. ChatGPT attracted 1 million users to register in 5 days and surpassed 100 million in 2 months, making it one of the fastest-growing applications in nearly 20 years of Internet development history.

However, the "rapid rise" of centralized AI models does not mean there are no hidden concerns. First, traditional centralized AI models often have a very large data collection and processing system, but it is difficult for outsiders to clearly understand how this data is collected, stored, annotated, and ultimately used for model training. The opaqueness at the data level raises questions about personal privacy protection and data security.

TIME once reported that during the ChatGPT training process, OpenAI hired Kenyan subcontractors to process a large amount of text involving sensitive content. These low-wage workers endured immense mental pressure from prolonged exposure to high-intensity psychological stimuli. Secondly, OpenAI, as an industry focus, has recently faced a series of issues: there were reports that it once again disbanded its security-related team AGI Readiness, and the frequent departure of key executives caused industry shockwaves. People began to question whether behind OpenAI's rapid expansion and commercialization, it truly balanced its focus on technological security and ethics. Of further concern, the core data and computing power in the AI industry are gradually concentrating in a few giant companies, and the public and entrepreneurs are worried about the monopolistic and unfair competition that may arise under this "big data + big company" landscape. By controlling vast amounts of data, these companies not only consolidate their control over technology and the market but also further raise the innovation threshold for small and medium-sized enterprises and individual developers.

At the same time, the combination of blockchain and AI is becoming increasingly popular. However, with the rise of this trend, short-term speculators have also increased, and many blockchain projects have begun to attract attention by leveraging the concept of AI. Even some meme projects have begun to latch onto the AI trend, attempting to use AI for camouflage.

But when a simple AI chatbot gains tens or hundreds of millions in market value through daily shitposting and then plummets over 90% in a Pump and Dump orchestrated by insider groups, the entire market appears more focused on short-term market effects rather than long-term technological development, and truly grounded projects are overlooked.

How to identify genuinely promising AI blockchain projects has become a pressing question that needs to be answered.

When investing in AI blockchain projects, it is essential to understand that the combination of AI and blockchain is not merely a simple technological stack but requires innovation in solving real-world problems within a decentralized blockchain framework, rather than just having an AI label attached to the project. OORT, as a leading decentralized AI (DeAI) project, launched the OORT DataHub Enterprise Edition on December 11, addressing pain points in AI training such as global data scarcity, opaque centralized AI data collection and processing, and lack of data diversity, providing a reliable decentralized solution for businesses, developers, and researchers.

OORT has also launched the OORT DataHub Mini App, by introducing the app on the Telegram platform, making it easier for users to contribute data and participate in decentralized data collection, while expanding the OORT ecosystem and increasing user engagement.

Classroom Entrepreneurship Originated from Real Needs

To understand OORT, one must first understand its unique founding background.

The birth of OORT was not due to the hype of the blockchain industry, nor was it intended to slap the "Web3" label on cloud services—the initial motivation came from a "real need" that Dr. Li faced while teaching an AI reinforcement learning course at Columbia University in 2018: students needed to complete a project to train an AI agent, but struggled due to the high costs of traditional cloud services (such as Amazon, Google). To help students afford computational power, Dr. Li conceived the idea of using a blockchain-based incentive layer to build decentralized cloud resources.

As the project transitioned from the classroom to commercial use, Dr. Li further realized that AI training and data collection faced common challenges such as high costs, high barriers to entry, and data bias in real-world scenarios. To achieve truly global data collection and have participants from around the world voluntarily contribute computational power and data, issues such as cross-border payments, credit endorsements, and revenue distribution had to be addressed; and the inherent characteristics of cryptocurrency payments, suitable for small-value, cross-border high-frequency settlements, happened to fill a critical gap in this business model. Unlike many projects that awkwardly piece together the "blockchain+AI" concept to chase after hot trends, OORT's positioning emphasizes real-world implementation needs: by leveraging decentralized cloud services and a fair and transparent incentive mechanism, reducing the costs of data and computational power in the AI development process, aligning more closely with traditional industries in a more commercial way, and truly leveraging the advantages of decentralization and encrypted payments.

OORT's technological expertise is remarkable. In addition to being an adjunct professor at Columbia University, founder Dr. Li is also a co-founder of Nakamoto & Turing Labs Inc. and a venture partner at the seed-stage accelerator Aves Lair. He has contributed numerous articles on blockchain and AI to Forbes. Previously, he worked in the research department of Qualcomm on 4G LTE and 5G system design. In the academic field, Dr. Li is a Senior Member of the IEEE, holds over 200 international and U.S. patents (granted and pending), and has published multiple academic papers in top journals such as "Proceedings of the IEEE," "IEEE Transactions on Information Theory," "IEEE Communications Magazine," "Automatica," and more. He also serves as a reviewer and a technical program committee member for various top journals and conferences in the communication and control fields.

OORT has also received favor from investors, currently raising a total of $10 million in funding, with investment institutions including Taisu Venture, Red Beard Venture, and Sanctor Capital, as well as sponsorship from Google and Microsoft.

Product and Ecosystem Are the AI Moats

NVIDIA laid out CUDA eighteen years ago, continuously investing and operating to build the moat for the AI gold rush. From this, we can also see that a true AI moat is definitely not just a stack of concepts, but a solid lineup of products and ecosystem. OORT has constructed a self-consistent "cloud service ecosystem" around computing power, storage, and data, which is key to supporting DeAI.

According to the official documentation, OORT's core idea is to provide developers with lower-cost, more elastic AI resources in a decentralized manner, while also offering the necessary components for developers. In terms of specific product forms, the team has divided the entire project into multiple functional modules and iterative stages. Looking at the roadmap, OORT plans to gradually release the storage layer, data management layer, and computing power layer, and integrate the three into a complete DeAI infrastructure ecosystem, allowing various AI applications and regular internet applications to be "plug and play."

Storage: OORT Storage

Among all cloud resources, storage is often the most fundamental and crucial. OORT's first flagship product is OORT Storage, which is a decentralized distributed storage system that allows users to encrypt and shard their data, models, or related files for storage across global nodes. Through a blockchain incentive mechanism, distributed nodes can help users achieve reliable data storage and retrieval.

Compared to traditional centralized storage services, OORT Storage emphasizes privacy and flexibility. By using OORT Storage, users can make more flexible and efficient use of storage services, reduce costs, and improve the alignment of configurations with needs. For AI applications that want to bridge multiple chains or scenarios, OORT Storage may provide a more controllable and flexible infrastructure path. Even for Layer 2, OORT Storage also provides DA layer services.

Data: OORT DataHub

Beyond storage, OORT also provides a "data management layer" aimed at users, developers, and data users — OORT DataHub. This part not only helps users efficiently manage datasets, flexibly set access permissions and usage policies, but also supports richer permission management and contract-driven data transactions and collaboration. It is worth noting that the commercial version of OORT DataHub was officially launched on December 11 and has already been listed on the Shenzhen Data Exchange, becoming the industry's first decentralized data collection and annotation platform.

Compared to traditional data management platforms, OORT DataHub leverages blockchain as an incentive and authentication layer, allowing users, developers, or enterprises to confidently share and annotate datasets, while also explicitly defining ownership and revenue distribution at the smart contract level.

Simply put, OORT DataHub addresses a significant pain point of data management platforms. First and foremost, it makes annotated data transparent and tamper-proof through the inherent features of blockchain, thus solving the black box problem of AI data collection. More importantly, it enables microtransactions through cryptocurrency, which not only has extremely low costs but also allows borderless transfers, providing natural convenience for small data providers and technical support for global data access. These are all unattainable in the traditional financial system.

Recently, the official team announced the launch of the all-new OORT DataHub Mini App on the Telegram Mini App, enabling more users to easily complete data contributions and decentralized data collection in a familiar social environment. Through Telegram's global user base, the coverage of the OORT ecosystem is further expanded, providing a more convenient entry point for individuals or teams from different backgrounds. Through this user-friendly approach, both new and existing users can directly participate in data contribution and collaboration within the messaging app, bringing more possibilities for the development of decentralized AI.

Compute Power: OORT Compute

Furthering the roadmap, OORT will launch OORT Compute after DataHub, which means that in addition to storage and data management, decentralized computing power will also be integrated into the system. This will allow developers to fulfill high-computing requirements such as training and inference within the same ecosystem. OORT will establish a closed-loop ecosystem where "storage + data management + computation" are intricately linked, providing one-stop support for AI implementation and paving the way for decentralized cloud services in more business domains.

The Commercialization Journey of OORT

A successful AI project relies not only on its innovative technology but also on its ability to translate this technology into business value. Take, for example, the collaboration between OORT AI and Zilliz Technology (a subsidiary of Lenovo Group). The two parties recently announced a three-year renewal of their contract.

OORT AI utilizes generative AI technology to provide a tailored platform that creates precise and secure AI agents using private data, offering multi-modal outputs such as images. Lenovo Image has integrated the OORT AI solution into its existing customer service application and uploaded service documents to OORT AI, successfully creating dedicated AI customer service agents. These agents effectively address user issues through AI, with human agents intervening only when necessary, thereby enhancing the overall responsiveness and efficiency of customer service experience.

According to feedback from previous collaborations, OORT has reduced enterprise customer service costs by about 40% and increased customer satisfaction to 95%.

The strong performance of the OORT AI solution is attributed to OORT's three core product lines mentioned earlier, targeting enterprise and individual customers, including the already launched OORT Storage, OORT DataHub (B2C, B2B), and the upcoming OORT Compute.

On the storage front, OORT partnered with BNB Greenfield, leveraging BNB Greenfield's extensive infrastructure of over 30,000 nodes worldwide to support BNB Greenfield, enhancing the excellent storage capabilities of the BNB Chain and ensuring privacy and cost efficiency. OORT also participated in Dell's innovative member loyalty programs launched in markets such as Canada, the United States, and Japan. OORT provided Dell customers with decentralized storage services, including data storage and migration, bridging the gap between web2 and web3 in data services, allowing users to securely store, migrate, and retrieve data anytime, anywhere.

In the process of a comprehensive layout of decentralized cloud and AI services, the commercial value brought by OORT DataHub is particularly prominent. According to a report released by KBV Research, the global data labeling solutions and services market is expected to reach $469 billion by 2030. For many small and medium-sized enterprises and startup teams, data is also a bottleneck in their development. They lack avenues to collect a sufficient, compliant, and high-value data set and find it harder to sustain a large-scale data labeling team. Meanwhile, there is a global data scarcity issue, as revealed by a recent article in Nature magazine on the "global data drought" — AI may deplete training data in 4 years. Various fields urgently need more scenario-based, diverse data.

OORT DataHub combines blockchain with incentives, allowing individuals or small organizations to conveniently contribute, label, and share data on an integrated platform. This not only effectively supplements data sources for enterprises and research institutions but also rewards data contributors reasonably and steadily through native tokens. Compared to traditional centralized models, the greatest advantage of decentralized data collection lies in mobilizing a global user base. It can quickly encompass raw materials from different languages, regions, or industries and help standardize data ownership and revenue sharing, reducing the risk of copyright and privacy disputes. Additionally, leveraging the low-cost and convenience of cross-border micro-settlements through encrypted payments, OORT DataHub can more efficiently incentivize global individuals, no longer constrained by differences in geography and fiat currency systems, thus completing the "last puzzle piece" of the entire business landscape. Truly achieving "Made by people, for people" — where a large number of individuals and organizations contribute data, computing power, and resources to build AI, and the end results serve everyone.

As for the accuracy and transparency of data annotation, OORT leverages its high-performance Layer-1 blockchain, Olympus Protocol, to enhance it. The Olympus Protocol connects global devices in the OORT network, including public and private clouds, smartphones, and computers. Its patented Proof of Honesty (PoH) consensus algorithm ensures all nodes operate honestly and optimizes resource allocation in a decentralized manner. In essence, the operation of the PoH algorithm involves randomly distributing data sets submitted by global contributors to other contributors to validate and verify data quality. If the audit is successful, the data submitter receives corresponding reward points; if the data is non-compliant or does not meet the standard, penalties or deductions are imposed.

Conclusion

Having explored OORT's product layout, business partnerships, and the underlying logic of the Olympus Protocol, let us also reflect on the name itself to trace the original intention buried behind the brand: According to the inference of astronomical theory, even if civilization advances to unimaginable heights, humanity may still not be able to truly cross the solar system surrounded by the Oort Cloud. This galaxy, which is already vast for us, is insignificant in the vast universe. It is for this reason that the name OORT also carries the team's contemplation of the boundaries of human cognition: Even if we are tiny and may never be able to break through that "distant cloud layer," we must carry awe and enthusiasm, continuously explore the limits of science and invention, and do our best to propel civilization forward.

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