Venice AI Emerges as a Decentralized Rival to ChatGPT and Gemini

The decentralized generative AI model, Venice AI, has connected to the internet and commenced real-time operations.

https://t.co/m2jsJuDuXS users, we hear you: real time info/web search is now available.

There is now a web-enabled AI model, and as of this morning it is the default.

This means you can ask questions that need live/up to date information from the web. The AI can now “see” the… pic.twitter.com/VwTsW8XeRQ

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) July 18, 2024

Launched in May by ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees, the AI is privacy-focused and positions itself as an alternative to centralized models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini.

Prior to the update, Venice AI was limited to knowledge from two years ago and struggled to compete with more popular AI models offering real-time responses.

Now, the neural network “can see the internet” and provide current information with source links.

“Unlike ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini, all conversations with Venice are private and require no permissions. Venice does not see your messages or responses, and all data is stored locally in your browser. Venice never censors AI responses,” noted Voorhees.

He added that the internet search utilizes the API of the privacy-oriented Brave browser.

h/t to @brave as our privacy-conscious non-Google API partner for web searches and to @NousResearch for the killer LLM

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) July 18, 2024

COO of Venice AI, Teana Baker-Taylor, told Decrypt that conversations with the AI are stored locally in the user’s browser and are not transmitted to company servers.

“This means you can have one conversation on your phone and another on your computer, and they do not intersect,” she added.

To avoid restarting conversations with the AI each time, Venice has introduced a feature to transfer conversations to another device using an encrypted link. A “Share” button has been added for this purpose.

** New Feature **

Had an interesting conversation with https://t.co/6v1emq50Dx and wished you could share it with a friend, on X, or just with yourself on another device?

Now you can. And, you’ll get referral points when your links bring new registered users to Venice.

The… pic.twitter.com/63fGPglDQO

— Venice (@AskVenice) July 18, 2024

Previously, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson expressed concerns about AI censorship, noting that modern models are controlled by a small group of people who select the information for their training.

In March, Microsoft began moderating requests in Copilot.

In March 2023, Reddit users discovered a way to bypass content moderation restrictions in ChatGPT.