AI projects bewilder

On a morning when Bitcoin petered out, XRP kicked into gear. The latter coin's resurgence began last Thursday with XRP seemingly on the verge of challenging $0.58. A range of $0.54-$0.55 held during the weekend.

As of this morning, XRP, sixth-largest digital asset, was $0.571, up 2%. At the same time, BTC was about $52,330 (+0.1%) and ETH was $2,930 (+1%).

Meanwhile, Pixels, a Ronin-run play-to-earn (P2E) game fusing a virtual agrarian society with actual blockchain pursuits, introduced its native PIXEL yesterday to a more than receptive audience. "It's already one of the ten most-traded tokens after Monday's airdrop," Decrypt said.

Late yesterday, PIXEL notched a $0.69 mark, though not on the dot. But that's basically the high so far after 30 hours or so of existence. As of 7:15 a.m. (EST), PIXEL was $0.58. It has a market capitalization of roughly $440 million, making it CoinGecko's 162nd-largest digital asset.

Ronin, billed as a kind of P2E developer paradise, has gained 2.8% in 24 hours to touch $3.31. It's No. 88 on the CoinGecko chart.

As far as the single-biggest gainer among the Top 100, that distinction goes to No. 80 Arweave. In the past 24 hours, the decentralized storage platform's native AR went from $13 to $16 for an increase of 24%.

So why is AR suddenly flirting with a price level not seen in a year-and-a-half, and might it tie into AI?

AR's rise remains something of a riddle wrapped in an enigma and placed in a flour tortilla then deep fried in hyper-parallel computing, allowing for infinite processing, which is probably going to play a significant role in a grandiose panoply of crypto categories such as tokenization, Web3, metaverse, gaming and, yes, AI.

Akin to Arweave is Filecoin, which gained 21%. FIL, native asset of the Filecoin file storage network, started surging early yesterday on Sunday's news that the network was partnering up with Solana on a project to boost that latter network’s decentralized data storage capabilities, moving away from centralized storage. FIL was $6 at this time yesterday. At last check, FIL, No. 26, was closing in on $8.

At the height of its chart domination on Monday afternoon, Worldcoin (WLD) hit $7.90. The level was reached as a renewed mania enveloped several AI-related tokens after OpenAI unveiled Sora, its text-to-video generator. This news lifted the spirits of digital market denizens who "view the AI sector as a key driver of profits this year," CoinDesk said.

Worldcoin is an iris biometric and crypto-related project spearheaded by a company, Tools for Humanity, co-founded by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. This connection has led some traders to treat WLD as a wager on OpenAI, CoinDesk explained.

As of 7:54 a.m. (EST), we were manually scouring the coin charts (while our devious chatbot assistant, "Chuck," was preoccupied creating a version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as performed by Ethel Merman) when we noticed, whoa, WLD was the single-worst performer in the Top 100.

WLD has declined 11.2% since yesterday at this time. It remains up 145% on the week. And WLD remains in the Top 100, barely. It's No. 97.

Checking in on Fetch.ai, we see FET (No. 87) is $0.94, slightly green (+1%). FET's all-time high of $1.17 came in early September of 2021, more than a year before ChatGPT even came on the scene at the end of '22.

Worldcoin's orbs can scan retinas and spit out a unique ID. Elon Musk's Neuralink is in the midst of an experimental study in which a robot surgically implanted a computer chip in a human brain. That pioneering test patient can now control a computer mouse using their thoughts, Musk said, per Reuters.

Meanwhile, Musk's more conventionally mind-blowing AI offering, Grok, meant to be a worthy challenger to ChatGPT, finds itself upstaged by similarly named Groq, an AI project which just unboxed a powerful public demo.

Groq established a superfast response speed bred from new technology that could one day eliminate the need for GPUs (Cointelegraph). It writes "factual, cited answers with hundreds of words in less than a second," said Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI and who closely chronicles new benchmarks in machine-generated outputs that mimic what a human might do (in hours or days).

Groq was founded in 2016. (Its team has called out Musk over the curious name that he gave to his AI model.) Groq’s "LPUs" (language processing unit, a new invention) could offer a “massive improvement” to GPUs, per a social media post from Jay Scambler, a self-described open-source AI optimist.

He also said LPUs might turn out to be a viable alternative to in-demand A100 and H100 chips produced by Nvidia.

Chatbots and image generation software hype (and shares of NVIDIA) roared in early 2023, flickered out, rekindled and is now back to being ablaze in the wake of OpenAI's launch of Sora last Friday.

"AI is proving to be the most disruptive technological invention of our age, TokenFi developer B told CoinDesk.

For now, the main commercial thrust of AI is centered around virtual tools and chat software, leading some developers to question the role of tokens within this early rubric.

“Current AI token projects may not yet know what these decentralized AI tools look like," said Aditya Khanduri, head of marketing at Biconomy. "There’s lots to be figured out.”