Decentralized AI in Seven Questions

We recently launched DeAI Nation — a non-profit focused on advancing decentralized AI and helping individuals, companies, and governments connect with this rapidly growing ecosystem. You may have already heard of a couple of DeAI projects: Akash, Telegram's Cocoon , Gonka by the Liberman brothers, or at least Bittensor . We started by writing the State of DeAI 2026 report, where we break down both the problem of AI centralization and the solutions that decentralized projects are proposing. You can read the full report at the link , and below I want to answer a few questions that came to my mind when I first heard about decentralized AI (DeAI). Please note that this is a deliberately oversimplified vision of DeAI to grasp the basics. We have a more detailed description of the tech in the report. Decentralized? Are models actually running on a blockchain? Yes and no. Nobody seriously runs models on a blockchain — that would be painfully slow and inefficient. Projects in this space use bl