Startups Race to Cheapen Onchain AI Inference

Three competing approaches—Orbio, Surplus Intelligence, and Antseed—are attacking the same bottleneck: the prohibitive cost of running AI computations on blockchain, which has kept onchain AI limited to toy applications. Whoever solves this captures economic rent on every AI transaction that moves from centralized servers to decentralized infrastructure, directly challenging cloud providers' monopoly on inference pricing and latency.