Caffeine AI is what we should focus? Or it’s a lost market

General DFINITY
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Caffeine AI is being sold as a unique product that leverages ICP unique architecture, every week we see advancements in this sector by the big tech companies, are we being competitors against this giants? Really? Doesn’t make any sense to even try to compete.

You compete on a sector where you are
1: providing unique value
2: you are revolutionizing that particular product

If orthogonal persistence was heavily promoted by @dominicwilliams as something unique that will make the AI building and upgrading the code of the app so smoothly, but now google says they have implemented the same thing where data isn’t “ lost” then where we are? Why would people use our product ? Because it’s “web3” because “can’t be hacked” ? Isn’t easier to use web2 AI tools to just copy paste that code in to canisters if someone wants those unique features of a blockchain cloud environment?

I like the idea of caffeine, but seems like we are competing and we are not being service providers, or creating a unique and revolutionary product.

I hope anyone from dfinity replies because this is a community, Investors concern. What happened with UTOPIA? That project was never mentioned again, will caffeine be forgotten too?

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The way I see it as a non tech guy, is that Firebase is web 2 tech, Caffeine AI is Web3. There’s things that will be built on chain that you just cant do on web 2. Most probably things that the human brain cant even think of yet. I doubt the plan for Caffeine Ai is to take over the cloud per se as not everything needs to be on chain.
Just my two cents

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Caffeine AI is building WEB3 Blockchain apps not WEB2

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After using Firebase for a few hours it’s not as good as it should be

It’s difficult to get pictures incerted correctly
Difficult/ almost impossible to update once deployed

That said it’s the worste it will ever be.

And it’s got 2nd mover advantage

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SWI AI is a new narrative to prevent Icp capitulation. Why on earth a dev needs to build on ICP using an AI agent(caffeine AI) When you can directly build thru giant AI LLM .

Without offchain LLM ,Caffeine will not born or even conceptualized.

The uniqueness is ONCHAIN dapp .etc. the same narrative Dom boasted many years ago . When he wants to compete centralized .like AWS , etc…

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If you go back, Dominic has been talking about singularity since the beginning. Can’t find it but there was an article written 2019-2021 talking about AI driven internet.

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What the community needs to focus on as a whole, IMO is simply embracing and preaching “web3”. Sure, pay attention to what Dfinity is doing, but also pay attention to what the world is doing. Stay ahead of the curve.

This is nothing new:

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Everything that I use, web3, browser, search engine, game, VPN, bandwidth sharing, etc.. etc.. Often times the the quality is the same. Sometimes better. Sometimes more clunky but improves over time. If its clunky make it better and suggest improvements. Suggest web hosting on ICP? No? Why not? Okay how do we fix it to make it the better alternative.

Practice what you preach, don’t wait for grass to grow.

I don’t find the question “is caffeine ai what we should focus on” all that interesting. The better question to ask is… why aren’t other people building it.

To me, I find Caffeine AI necessity as I mentioned before, this is nothing new, sure improvements have been made and hype to drive interest chasing the trend, but if you want people to use the network you need to make it easy for them, so yeah, I am not sure why people are questioning Caffeine AI.

  • Web hosting
  • Payment system
  • CMS
  • Gaming
  • RWA

from the top of my head… lots of things are a hard sell for me to recommend to someone from a practical perspective. Gaming and Caffeine AI and web hosting are much easier, but still could be a bit more of a clunky experience because of how new ICP is relatively speaking. CMS, from a practical point tooling need to be made, so I would have to package the workflow dealing with the nuances into an all in one package, but nothing exists thats complete solution you can just send someone to. The margins aren’t there, but for anyone else in the world I’m sure the margins are there where you can do that, package the workflow and share it grow the ecosystem.

Even Gaming, for me was a bit of a hard sell (ICP price too high, small dev ecosystem, onboarding)… Avax too clunky but subnets is a good sell for people interested in maintaining control, Flow kinda iffy, decent onboarding, Thirdweb + Solana decent… But then NFID / slightly better dev ecosystem, and private networks if that ever comes out.

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What you mean lost market? like there is no room in this AI market for competitors? Dfinity is the only one doing AI web3 in a secure tamper proof cannister. I’m not worried, I’m actually happy Dfinity is taking their time with this because you just can’t bring a half-ass tool to the market.

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Gaming is a wide niche with live streaming. ICP still in challenges for streaming.

RWA- I think icp is on top of it especially the zero gas fee nft transfers. I proposed to some nft projects especially origyn 2 years ago to onboard SMEs .since luxury items is not as fast moving as retails.

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It’s all just buzzwords and KoolAid drinking. “It’s Web3 not Web2”. Well, clients don’t care at all about these things: they care about utility and user experience. If Web 2 offers that better, that’s what they will choose, and in fact that is what they are choosing as proved by this crypto cycle where the only success story for smart-contract driven chains is meme coins.
Dfinity has really provided no explanation of why CaffeineAI will be better than the hundred other AI agents out there. Just some jargon that impresses the naive.
If Caffeine AI is what we are betting the future of ICP on, the future is very bleak.

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Lets say I own a law firm and want to train sovereign ai on my companies previous, highly confidential court documents. Do you really believe I am just going to upload all that to the World Wide Web and hope for the best. Of course I’m not. I will find the service that can offer me secure, tamperproof environments, where I can own my companies full data, trust that it is sovereign, and then be happy to implement the ai into the working business.

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Moschus You’re kinda proving my point about Web3. Most people don’t care about Web3, but a solid foundation driving the crypto market does. You’re welcome to bet on Big Tech, if you want, providing “better utility” or “better experience” while other people just copy and paste what works. Look at the OpenAI/deepseek scare. Whatever happened to IBM? Look at Adobe. Look at Blizzard. At a certain point, the foundation that helped companies going get left behind and neglected. Then they branch off and start a new without Web3 principals, and the vicious cycle continues.

You’re not gonna convince the masses about Web3. Not convinced about Web3 but wanna compete with corporate giants? Good luck… Meanwhile, Web3ers just let corporate giants spend resources and race to the bottoming each other, then “deepseek effect” what works and tokenize with crypto.

Buzzwords? KoolAid drinking? Maybe. Depends on you. Web3 is just a buzzword to many. Not to me.

There’s really minimal difference between smart phones. Minimal difference between many things. It’s a race to the bottom. Any “UX experience” is an easy fix and the foundation built with ICP is simpler to maintain, something you can’t really explain to people that aren’t technical. For the technical, some would argue ICP lacks ecosystem, which actually makes it more difficult, which is short sightedness and neglecting to mention the millions upon millions of investment and hours to make spaghetti that exponentially increases complexity to further abstract and simplify maintenance… while investing your time and effort into a dead end like I mentioned before.

Caffeine AI and other generators built off a foundation created by billions of investment from big corporations spending. Copy and paste and tokenize. I’m not betting on big corporations or small corporations hoping to become big corporation or caffeine AI magic hype… Just living life and tokenizing anything that I can.

If the end result is AI being commoditized, you can support, invest, or use products offered by corporate giants or small teams hoping to become giants. You can “web3” what’s good enough, if you understand web3 beyond buzzwords.

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Dominic Williams says in pretty much every post that ICP offers a secure, tamperproof environment where you own your data but that’s a complete lie. An NNS vote can tamper with the data and take it away from you. You just have to trust NNS voters not to do that.

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EASY GPT ARGUMENT:

While it’s technically true that the Network Nervous System (NNS) has ultimate control over the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) through governance, saying that “you just have to trust NNS voters” misses the deeper architecture and incentives behind how ICP is designed.

1. NNS Governance ≠ Arbitrary Power

The NNS isn’t a centralized body—it’s a decentralized DAO-like governance system. Any proposal to interfere with user data or canister state would require widespread consensus among neuron holders who have financial skin in the game. These are not random voters—they’re heavily incentivized to maintain the network’s credibility, security, and utility. Destroying user trust would tank the value of their own ICP holdings and dissolve confidence in the entire ecosystem.

2. Tampering Is Not the Default Behavior

Just because something is technically possible doesn’t mean it’s likely. The possibility of tampering is an edge case used for governance emergencies (like bugs, vulnerabilities, or malicious canisters)—not a routine or arbitrary action. It’s comparable to root access in an operating system: dangerous in the wrong hands, but critical for managing catastrophic failure. So, the idea that “your data can just be taken away” is misleading—it would require a public, irreversible, and extremely costly governance action.

3. You Own the Data, In Context

Ownership on ICP means that your canister state is replicated, certified, and tamper-evident across a threshold of independent node providers. The data is cryptographically signed and verified. This is a much stronger form of data integrity than on traditional cloud services where a single admin or employee can quietly edit your files or remove access.

4. Compare to Traditional Cloud

If you’re using AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, there’s no vote or transparency—they can and have deleted accounts or censored applications without notice. With ICP, you’d at least see the vote, the reasoning, and the identities (neurons) that participated. It’s not about trusting the system blindly—it’s about having visibility and mechanisms to challenge it.

5. “Just host it yourself” ≠ True Sovereignty or Security

While self-hosting may seem like the ultimate path to data ownership, it comes with massive trade-offs in security, uptime, and scalability:

  • Security risks: Most people don’t patch systems fast enough, don’t harden their network layers properly, and can easily be compromised. Running your own server exposes you to DDoS, ransomware, physical hardware failure, and data loss unless you’re an expert in ops and security.
  • No redundancy or tamperproofing: ICP replicates your canister state across independent node providers, giving you Byzantine fault tolerance and cryptographic guarantees of integrity. Your Raspberry Pi or home server doesn’t. You pull the plug, your site dies. Someone breaks into your house? Game over.
  • You’re still trusting infrastructure: Even with your own hardware, you rely on your ISP, your power grid, your domain registrar, and upstream services. These are all single points of failure. ICP abstracts that away with a global, censorship-resistant protocol layer. Hosting isn’t just about the machine—it’s about the whole trust chain.
  • Self-hosting ≠ composability: With ICP, your data and compute can interoperate with other canisters, dapps, or DAOs permissionlessly. Try doing that from your self-hosted box without opening ports, dealing with TLS, load balancing, etc. You’re locking yourself out of the networked future.
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clasping at straws now

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In light of this comment:

…what is your source or demo for updating apps on Firebase studio? I’d like to see their version of orthogonal persistence.

Disagree. Non-tech users like me do care about the ideals of web 3, but utility and user experience weighs more in our decision on what to use. For instance, we might not care as much about data ownership if the user experience/utility is slow and very limited (esp. the latter).

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you are correct, and its because dom Williams is better at being a hype merchant than being a product-focused technologist. In fact, there have not been any successful product on IC.

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Openchat, oisy, and kong are successful products and examples of whats possible. We just need more of that.

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A thread that I’ll link over here.