What if the smartest AI didn’t live in a hyperscale data center—but across millions of everyday devices? In this episode, Chris Davis sits down with Ivan Nikitin, co-founder of Fortytwo, an AI network built on crypto rails that turns idle consumer hardware into a global swarm of specialized models. After a decade in traditional AI—training agents, conversational systems, and even a spatial reasoning foundation model—Ivan hit the hard wall of AI scalability: not enough compute, endlessly bigger data centers, and no sustainable path forward. Fortytwo flips that script. Instead of one giant “god model,” it orchestrates small, specialized models into a swarm inference network. Each query is handled by a sub-swarm of experts that generate answers, peer-rank each other’s outputs, and aggregate the best result—creating a system that’s more robust to hallucinations, prompt injection, and noisy prompts (yes, including the “cat on the roof” test). Messari’s State of AI Report calls decentralized inference “one of the most important emerging architectures in AI,” and this conversation offers a firsthand look into how that future might unfold. Read the Full State of AI 2025 for FREE: https://messari.io/report/state-of-ai 00:00 – Introductions 03:05 – Crypto & Security 10:16 – Models & Swarm Performance 24:02 – Consumer Devices & Nodes 38:02 – Custom Model Training 43:16 – Demand & Pricing 53:31 – Future, Token & Data Use 59:00 – Conclusion Hosted by Chris Davis of Messari Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of crypto, DePIN, and real-world infra. Follow Messari on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MessariCrypto Follow Unqualified Opinions on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0uG5qpwFg67zTt0VQRTaZ7?si=13163cbebe01415e Follow Unqualified Opinions on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/messaris-unqualified-opinions/id1455666979 ____ This episode and its contents do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Messari, Inc. Hosts and guests may hold cryptocurrencies discussed in this content. This content is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research, and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. Nothing contained in this content is a recommendation or suggestion, directly or indirectly, to buy, sell, make, or hold any investment, loan, commodity, or security, or to undertake any investment or trading strategy with respect to any investment, loan, commodity, security, or any issuer. This content should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security or commodity. Messari does not guarantee the sequence, accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any information provided in this content.
