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After the AI Agent bubble bursts, where will the next wave of trends and projects be?
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The market is now focused on pure fundamentals, and people are more concerned about infrastructure and decentralized AI, especially as AI models in Web2 continue to accelerate at a rapid pace - Meta's Llama, OpenAI's GPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen are launching new improved and optimized models every month. You can see that ChatGPT's image generation model created a viral "Miyazaki-ization" trend immediately after its launch. In addition to this, the consumer side of Web2 is advancing at a faster pace due to the improvement of AI model capabilities, and things that were previously impossible are now possible - Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, Windsurf allow developers to release more products faster. Agent workflows and AI agents are everywhere. The barrier to entry is lowered and the switching cost for users is almost zero. If you don't like an application, you can easily find a competitor service or product with a better price and better UI/UX.
Decentralized AI will emerge in the second quarter of 2025, with infrastructure that enhances confidentiality, transparency, verifiability, and ownership, and will therefore gain more adoption and attention as the demand for these features becomes stronger.
Web2 AI venture capital trends, such as YC company launched vertical agency, a16z positioned future consumer trends through its arguments, Perplexity launched its AI fund Web3 AI venture capital trends, such as DeAI infrastructure investment, distributed training, reasoning network, etc. Web3 AI retail trends, such as AI agency ecosystem, consumer agency, AI consumer application
For Web2, since the total available market is significantly larger than Web3, i.e. there are many businesses looking to transform or optimize their business through AI, improve workflows in order to generate more leads, more conversions, more sales, retain more customers, reduce management costs, and operate at a higher level, many businesses look for solutions that can solve highly specific pain points within their specific areas. This need for optimization has attracted many young startup founders looking for better ways to introduce AI agents to improve workflows. Compared to traditional SaaS, the solutions provided by AI agents can significantly save capital or generate more leads. This allows agent startups to charge higher subscription fees for their use. For Web3 VCs, the trends here are very different because blockchain provides the perfect layers for decentralized AI, such as verifiable/immutable transaction traces, trustless environments, decentralized computing, trust-minimized AI reasoning and training. In short, the future direction is for people to know how their data is processed, understand the AI's thought process, own their data, own the model, own the use case, and be incentivized to share, etc. Web3 VCs have been investing in these futures.
Decentralized AI is very difficult for Web3 retail to understand because it requires you to learn a lot of terms and understand the important things. That’s why retail tends to choose the easiest thing to understand — starting with Web3 AI agents that can chat, be funny, and do some entertainment activities.
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