How A Columbia Class Project Became Decentralized AI Solutions

If we examine the world’s most successful tech companies closely, an interesting pattern emerges: most began in academic settings. Google was conceived at Stanford University, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed their search engine as part of a PhD project. Facebook was launched in a Harvard dorm room by Mark Zuckerberg to connect classmates before it expanded to transform social media. Many other innovations—VMware, NVIDIA—can trace their origins to university labs, lecture halls, or student dormitories.

What I specialize in today is no exception. The decentralized AI platform OORT, which my team and I are building, also has its academic foundation. It began during a course I taught at Columbia University in 2018 called “Reinforcement Learning in AI.” That course became the starting point for a significant idea that was ahead of its time and is now gaining widespread attention.

The Classroom Challenge

The course’s final project required students to train AI agents. For non-technical readers, this process involves teaching an AI model to learn and make data-based decisions. It is similar to providing structured training to a digital system by feeding it information, guiding its responses, and improving its performance through iterative feedback.

However, training AI agents requires significant resource requirements. It demands substantial computing power and large amounts of storage to handle and process data. Traditional cloud services, such as those offered by Amazon and Google, charge high fees for these resources, making them inaccessible to most student budgets.

This limitation became apparent as many postgraduate students faced difficulties completing their projects. While they demonstrated creativity and technical capability, the required infrastructure was out of reach. This raised a key question: Could there be a way to bypass expensive, centralized cloud services and develop a more accessible and cost-effective solution?

Prototype for Decentralized Solutions

We started exploring how blockchain could serve as an incentive layer for creating a decentralized cloud solution for AI development, allowing students to complete their final projects realistically.

Here’s what we did:

• Utilizing Idle Resources Globally: The platform uses underutilized resources worldwide, such as spare hard drives in offices and unused bandwidth on personal computers.
• Built on Blockchain: Blockchain technology enables a transparent and secure network for integrating these distributed resources.
• Adopting Crypto Payment: The platform adopted crypto for instant worldwide small transactions. This is because the current financial system does not support instant worldwide small transactions.

In simple terms, think of this as the Airbnb of infrastructure. Just as Airbnb allows homeowners to rent out unused rooms, the platform developed for students enables individuals to contribute their spare storage or computing power to a shared cloud, significantly reducing costs.

This decentralized experiment, created for Columbia students in 2018, proved to be a prototype for today’s concepts of Decentralized AI (DeAI) and Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN). In essence, DePIN is the backbone that enables DeAI systems to function effectively, while DeAI represents the application layer that uses the decentralized infrastructure. At its core, DePIN focuses on the physical layer—the infrastructure that powers decentralized ecosystems. This includes networks of globally distributed resources like storage, computing, and bandwidth, all connected via blockchain technology. Think of DePIN as the foundation, the pipes, and wires that make the decentralized ecosystem possible.

DeAI builds on top of this infrastructure, leveraging these decentralized resources to enable AI development and deployment in a distributed manner. Instead of relying on a single, centralized entity like a tech giant to train and run AI models, DeAI uses the shared infrastructure created by DePIN to provide affordable, scalable, and equitable access to AI resources.

Some common benefits of decentralized solutions include:

• Cost reduction in AI training and deployment
• Enhanced data transparency, privacy and security
• A more global, diverse and unbiased datasets foundation
• Improved disaster recovery and business continuity

Uncertainties and Possibilities

As discussed in previous articles, the recent surge of decentralized AI addresses doubts about centralized AI. The general belief is that, with blockchain technology, AI can become truly open-source and transparent.

Of course, this hasn’t been easy. Building decentralized infrastructure has presented technological challenges we had never encountered before. From optimizing network reliability to ensuring data security across a distributed system, we’ve been solving problems step by step. Additionally, with speculative investment flooding the space and the AI race intensifying between nations like the U.S. and China, many AI projects are expected to fail in 2025.

Despite its challenges, DeAI’s potential still offers a promising outlook for the future. It envisions a system where access to AI tools is not limited by geography or economic status, and this is both practical and technically feasible. This could allow a student in New York, a teacher in Buenos Aires, or a small business in Nairobi to train AI models or store data with the same affordability and ease as larger corporations.

Unexpected opportunities, challenges, and learning experiences have marked the progression from Columbia classrooms to decentralized AI. What began as a solution to help students complete their projects has grown into an effort to rethink infrastructure, accessibility, and innovation.

As more professionals from diverse fields recognize the potential of decentralized AI (DeAI) to transform industries, interest and momentum are likely to grow, positioning 2025 as a pivotal year for its development. The integration of blockchain and AI is set to move into the mainstream, laying the groundwork for technological advancements with far-reaching impacts in the years to come.