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This is the 94th edition of The Web3 + AI Daily - your definitive guide to the intersection of blockchain and AI! It’s Friday, so I’ve curated a rich collection of news stories, conversations, and opinion pieces for you to explore over the weekend.
On the menu: how decentralized and sovereign AI contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, does AI produce as much value as it costs, and why it is extremely dangerous to blur the lines between humans and machines.
Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.
What’s Hot in Web3 + AI?
FLock.io Advances UNDP Partnership, Secures Prestigious Conference Acceptances
FLock.io, the Web3 and AI federated learning provider, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have stengtened their partnership to advance public sector digital innovation for the Dominican Republic, leveraging distributed systems, privacy-preserving technologies, and AI applications.
FLock.io led cohort 2 of pilots of the SDG Blockchain Accelerator – an initiative by the UNDP AltFinLab team to scale practical solutions powered by AI and blockchain for sustainable development worldwide – in regions including the Caribbean, Liberia, Rwanda and Latin America, with cohort 3 to follow. In May, FLock.io visited the Dominican Republic to advance one such project: crop microinsurance to deliver payouts for damaged crops (which was previously unavailable to smallholder farmers) that combine AI-powered risk assessment with instant blockchain-based payouts. The team heard directly from local female farmers about the challenges they face. This is one example of FLock.io’s privacy-preserving AI and blockchain technology that doesn’t expose raw or sensitive data.
This ongoing relationship between FLock.io and UNDP showcases how the convergence of blockchain and AI could boost social and environmental justice.
If you're curious to find out how decentralized and sovereign AI can help the United Nations achieve its Sustainable Development Goals, watch the conversation below between FLock.io's Tiffany Wang and Robert Pasicko, team lead at UNDP Alternative Finance Lab:
In other news, FLock.io had several research papers accepted by some of the most prestigious scientific conferences in the world.
First, the team had two papers on generative models for protein dynamics accepted by the world’s premier research conference in data mining, IEEE ICDM 2026. The research was performed in collaboration with the University of Oxford and Korea University.
Moreover, six papers tackling decentralized AI and authored by Dr Zehua Cheng, FLock.io’s Chief AI Scientist, were accepted by the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM).
Web3 + AI Readings & Conversations
Is AI at the Workplace Waste of Money?
Even if it may not seem that way at first glance, the following story is closely connected to the AI Doom crisis we’ve been dealing with lately. We are gradually reaching a point where AI’s biggest users are beginning to realize that their exorbitant spending is not producing the returns they expected, and that AI may not be able to replace their workforce after all.
They already discovered that open-source models are just as capable as the “God-like” frontier ones, but come at a fraction of the cost. Soon, they’ll stop paying for frontier AI altogether. And that is precisely what AI leaders like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman fear the most.
The Wall Street Journal just held its Technology Council Summit where “the gap between artificial-intelligence costs and the value the technology delivers was a key topic.” What most business executives shared is that they are getting enough value from AI to continue spending on it, but measuring exactly where the ROI is happening remains a challenge.
“According to Kate Smaje, McKinsey & Company’s latest research shows that 80% of workers feel they are getting a productivity boost from AI. However, only 6% of companies are getting real, measurable, financial ROI they can show to investors.”
A lot of wastage comes from using AI or agents for straightforward use cases that don’t require such a powerful solution.
“One money waster? An automatic out-of-office responder one employee at an unnamed company built with AI that turned out to cost $10,000 a day, David Hsu said.”
What companies should do to optimize their AI spending is:
Analyze the tasks they are automating on a granular level;
Bet on case-specific open-source models instead of always relying on frontier ones;
Combine investments in AI with workforce upskilling and organizational change management.
Ultimately, the majority of the corporations estimate that AI is wasting more money than it’s worth.
Emily M. Bender Won’t Talk to You If You Fail to Acknowledge Her Humanity
The New York Magazine published a fascinating profile of Emily M. Bender - the University of Washington computational linguistics professor who has spent decades urging people to stop anthropomorphizing AI and “imagining the mind behind the chatbot.”
The main theme of the article is the growing wave of tech practitioners who benefit from presenting AI as sentient, intentional, and human-like, while at the same time refusing to extend moral standing to humans just for being humans.
Bender is also one of the authors of "The AI Con" - a title we recently explored in The Web3 + AI Newsletter. You can find my review of the book below.
Thank you for reading! I hope you found this article insightful.
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Disclaimer: The content of this newsletter is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice or as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any of the companies or assets mentioned.
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