Inside OpenxAI: Founder Ashton Hettiarachi on the Mission to Decentralize and Democratize AI

Estimated Reading Time: 9-10 minutes

In an era defined by rapid technological advancement, artificial intelligence stands at the forefront, promising to reshape industries and societies. Yet, its transformative power comes with a critical challenge: centralization. The vast majority of AI’s infrastructure, data, and models reside under the control of a select few tech giants, raising concerns about access, control, and equitable distribution of this revolutionary technology.

This pressing issue forms the core of Ashton Hettiarachi’s mission. As the Founder and Architect of OpenxAI and Openmesh Network, Hettiarachi envisions a dramatically different future for AI. “Artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology of our time, but it’s also one of the most centralized. Big tech companies control the data, the models, and the infrastructure. Ashton Hettiarachi, Founder and Architect of OpenxAI and Openmesh Network, believes AI should be decentralised and democratised for all. His vision – An open-source, permissionless AI ecosystem, where anyone, anywhere, can build, own, and interact with intelligent systems without corporate gatekeepers.”

In a revealing conversation with HackerNoon, Ashton unpacks the vision behind OpenxAI, explains why decentralization is essential to the future of AI, and how we can unlock a more open and equitable intelligence ecosystem.

Hettiarachi’s journey to founding OpenxAI stems from a stark realization about the current state of AI. “AI is the most advanced technology that humans have ever invented. However, the power of AI is not distributed equally. Today’s AI does not follow democracy. It is a monopoly.” He argues that AI has transcended being merely a tool; it has become a potent source of influence and power, akin to a modern “ark of the covenant.” This power, he notes, is dangerously concentrated in the hands of trillion-dollar corporations that dictate the narrative, control talent, own infrastructure, and even shape regulations.

This concentration, Hettiarachi asserts, is not merely a monopoly but a “chokehold on the future of intelligence itself.” His inspiration for OpenxAI was born from the conviction that AI, like the internet, should be “free, open, and accessible to everyone.” The gap was glaring: if AI is so crucial, it cannot remain centralized. It desperately needs to be decentralized, permissionless, and community-owned. OpenxAI, in this context, is Hettiarachi’s contribution to this vision – “a protocol that makes intelligence as open and unstoppable as the internet.”

Describing OpenxAI Network as the “first peer-to-peer permissionless AI protocol,” Hettiarachi draws a compelling parallel: “What Bitcoin did for money, OpenxAI does for intelligence.” This radical shift aims to empower individuals globally. “With OpenxAI, anyone anywhere in the world can launch an AI company in under five minutes without needing a bank account, corporate approval, or millions of dollars in funding. That is the kind of change the AI ecosystem desperately needs.”

The core of OpenxAI’s innovation lies in its permissionless, peer-to-peer model. Hettiarachi explains that just as IPFS or Filecoin enable permissionless file storage and public sharing, OpenxAI extends these principles to AI applications and agents. This means users can host AI agents, own their entire infrastructure and application layer, and share them in a peer-to-peer fashion. Trust and security are intrinsically woven into the protocol’s fabric, ensuring that only the user can alter, update, or delete their creations. “No one, not even a government or a core team member of OpenxAI, can change that.” This eliminates middlemen and centralized choke points, fostering direct interaction between builders and consumers.

An on-chain layer further bolsters this decentralized architecture, allowing builders to embed specific smart contract logic for payments, subscriptions, and security. This removes the reliance on traditional SaaS technologies or Web2 components, creating a seamless and truly decentralized experience.

Hettiarachi uses the “Skyscanner for Compute & GPUs” metaphor to describe OpenxAI’s approach to compute resources. Acknowledging the fluctuating nature of compute prices, much like the hotel industry, OpenxAI has developed a universal API that aggregates pricing across a vast network of servers. This tool, which Hettiarachi likens to “Google Search for GPUs or Google Search for Compute,” efficiently matches user requirements with available supply from over 25,000 servers.

By directly partnering with wholesale providers such as Equinix, High Velocity, and Vultr, OpenxAI bypasses the retail pricing of major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft. This strategy has resulted in substantial cost reductions, “up to 80 percent, and in some cases, even 90 percent.” Beyond cost, this decentralized model also champions sustainability. By aggregating underutilized GPUs globally and collaborating with data centers powered by renewable energy, OpenxAI significantly reduces energy consumption (up to 40 percent) and carbon emissions (35 percent) compared to traditional providers. As Hettiarachi puts it, “Decentralization is not just cheaper. It is greener.”

The inherent trade-off of decentralization often involves latency or reliability issues. Hettiarachi addresses this directly, referencing past decentralized compute projects like Golem that struggled with these very challenges due to an overly distributed model. OpenxAI has chosen a different path, prioritizing a high-quality user experience from day one. The network is built upon a foundation of reliable, large data centers, partnering with world-class providers like Equinix, High Velocity, and Vultr, which guarantee “99.99 percent uptime.” These are the same trusted providers relied upon by S&P 500 companies, AWS, and IBM, ensuring OpenxAI users benefit from comparable reliability and latency. For optimal performance, OpenxAI leverages fiber connectivity, such as Equinix Fabric, to guarantee high-speed, low-latency performance between continents.

Data privacy and ownership are cornerstones of the OpenxAI promise. In the Web2 paradigm, accounts and data are typically tied to emails or phone numbers, making them vulnerable to various digital attacks. OpenxAI revolutionizes this by attaching the encryption key for a user’s rented server directly to their Web3 wallet. Leveraging “cryptography and distributed ledgers,” this design ensures that all data, applications, infrastructure, and even a user’s “backpack” are connected to their Web3 wallet, providing an unparalleled layer of security. “In our design, the only person who can access the server credentials is the user.” This means compromising a user’s data would necessitate breaching their Web3 wallet or the Ethereum network itself, making it “nearly impossible” as long as private keys are protected.

Hettiarachi highlights the arduous process AI developers currently face in monetizing their creations. From setting up SaaS systems for billing to navigating credit card processors, banks, and legal entities, the journey from idea to revenue is fraught with bureaucratic hurdles and significant time investment. This also excludes large unbanked populations globally. “AI is still trapped on 20th-century rails.”

OpenxAI introduces a “completely new approach”:

“Everything is on-chain. Everything is permissionless.” Developers can utilize smart contracts to design intricate business logic, configure revenue models, and embed subscription fees directly on-chain. Consumers pay creators directly, cutting out middlemen, and developers can accept any form of crypto payment. This empowers developers to launch and monetize AI services rapidly from anywhere, tokenizing their models, agents, and services seamlessly. “Zero middlemen. Pure peer-to-peer AI.”

This creates a world where: “Imagine a student in Kenya running a ChatGPT-style service from their bedroom, offering it to the world, collecting payments, and expanding without banks or corporations. That is true power.”

Operating with no KYC, region locks, and borderless access naturally brings up regulatory questions. Hettiarachi clarifies that OpenxAI functions as “an open-source, permissionless protocol, similar to Bitcoin.” There’s “no company, no CEO, no foundation, and no board. It is a living and breathing digital organism, like the internet, IPFS, or Ethereum.” The network is designed for open, permissionless access, with no gatekeeping. OpenxAI does not collect user data and lacks the ability to shut down services. If someone abuses the network, it becomes a law enforcement issue, not a protocol issue. Hettiarachi believes that regulating at the protocol level stifles innovation, drawing a parallel to the internet itself: “Imagine if the internet protocol itself had been regulated at the base level. Our world would look very different today.”

In a market with both centralized AI giants and numerous open-source players, OpenxAI stands out by being “not just open-source. It is permissionless and decentralized.” This allows anyone, anywhere, to deploy and own AI agents or services. This dramatically expands AI entrepreneurship, reaching “regions and communities that have been excluded from the AI economy.” The crucial differentiator is ownership: “For the first time, anyone can actually own AI models. By tokenizing them, they can be traded, monetized, and shared directly, with no middlemen. This is not a feature. It is a new economic model.” This, Hettiarachi predicts, will unleash an unprecedented wave of global AI entrepreneurship.

Recognizing the need for accessibility, OpenxAI designed its Studio v5 with simplicity in mind. For non-technical users, “the experience is as easy as signing up for Gmail.” The web-based console, X Studio, enables anyone to launch AI services or agents without requiring deep technical expertise, while advanced users have tools to leverage the network’s full capabilities. The goal is to make decentralized infrastructure feel as familiar as platforms like Hugging Face.

OpenxAI’s immediate roadmap is ambitious. The biggest milestone is the launch of Studio v5 this October, which Hettiarachi describes as “one of the most powerful Web3 AI platforms ever built,” empowering both non-technical creators and professional developers to build, deploy, and monetize AI services directly on-chain. November will see an expansion beyond Ethereum to chains like BNB and Solana, introducing “cross chain AI provisioning,” a novel capability allowing builders to deploy AI applications on one chain while managing revenue or infrastructure on another. This opens the door to a multi-chain future for AI, fostering entirely new use cases.

Looking three years ahead, Hettiarachi envisions significant adoption within the first year, with “thousands of AI entrepreneurs” launching serious applications and businesses, projecting “more than 10,000 deployments in the first year alone.” He believes OpenxAI will do for AI creators what the internet did for content creators. “Just as YouTube turned anyone with a camera into a broadcaster and just as Spotify gave musicians a global stage, OpenxAI gives AI creators the same freedom. But this time, the opportunity is even larger.” This paradigm shift enables new business models: micro-subscriptions, pay-per-query knowledge markets, community-owned datasets, and tokenized AI models that generate yield. “This is not just about building applications. It is about unleashing a new creative and economic class, where intelligence becomes a shared global resource instead of a corporate monopoly.”

Ashton Hettiarachi and OpenxAI are not just building another platform; they are forging a new foundation for artificial intelligence. By championing decentralization and challenging the concentrated power of big tech, they are creating a truly open, permissionless, and community-owned intelligence ecosystem. This vision promises not only unprecedented cost savings and efficiency but also a more equitable distribution of AI’s immense power, fostering innovation and entrepreneurship on a global scale. As transformative as the printing press, the personal computer, or the internet, OpenxAI aims to usher in an era where intelligence is a shared global resource, accessible to all.

Ready to explore the future of decentralized AI? Visit the OpenxAI website today to learn more about their mission, capabilities, and how you can become part of the movement to democratize intelligence.