OORT’s holistic approach to artificial intelligence technology could significantly alter the AI landscape. The project has leveraged blockchain and decentralization to build a comprehensive product suite that spans information storage, data collection, and model training. OORT offers many advantages over traditional systems, but how exactly does it work?
Throughout this article, we provide a comprehensive explainer of what OORT is and how it works. We discuss its features and who they’re best suited to while highlighting why many businesses and creators choose OORT as their AI infrastructure provider. Let’s dive in.
What is OORT?
Founded in May 2021 by Columbia University professor Dr. Max Li, OORT is a premier decentralized cloud solution for artificial intelligence. The project utilizes blockchain technology (an unalterable public ledger of information) to maintain and enhance transparency, security, and scalability, fostering an excellent user experience.
OORT caters to individuals and businesses through its comprehensive suite of products. The project offers custom AI agents to improve the customer experience, a decentralized data storage segment, a data collection system, and an upcoming compute service for scalable AI model training.
The advantages of OORT’s cloud solution are numerous. Due to its use of decentralization and blockchain technology, OORT is highly scalable and flexible, enabling users to receive as much or as little on-demand data, storage, or compute resources as their application requires. Businesses can benefit from cost savings of up to 80% when using OORT’s services, which industry titans like Dell, Lenovo, and Tencent Cloud trust.
OORT has the potential to disrupt prominent industries like cloud computing and customer service as it can reduce costs while offering superior service to competing solutions. For example, OORT collaborated with Lenovo Image, reducing operational costs by 90% while achieving a 95% customer satisfaction rate after implementing OORT’s AI agents.
OORT aims to lead AI standards and enhance transparency, quality, and security in the space while supporting the complete life cycle of data handling and processing. The team is committed to building an innovative decentralized AI platform that can compete with traditional centralized offerings.
How Does OORT Work?
OORT is a comprehensive single-platform AI ecosystem, which sets it apart from competitors. The project’s Olympus protocol further supports the OORT team’s vision for accessibility in the AI space by facilitating interoperability across multiple blockchain networks, which allows OORT to connect with prominent blockchains like Ethereum or BNB Chain, making OORT a valuable tool for a diverse range of use cases.
Instead of relying on centralized services or intermediaries, OORT has opted to take a decentralized approach to AI cloud services. Storage and compute resources are spread across a network of over 74,500 nodes hosted in 118 countries. People can earn rewards by contributing spare resources or high-quality data to the network for applications to leverage.
Olympus is a propriety layer-1 protocol that powers OORT. It has been optimized for low transaction fees and high throughput (the amount of transactions the network can handle). Olympus’s efficiency is down in large part due to its implementation of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology, which enables the simultaneous processing of multiple transactions.
OORT’s services have a multitude of uses within business settings. Industries like healthcare or finance can leverage the cloud storage segment to securely store data that companies cannot afford to lose. Similarly, businesses building AI models can leverage DataHub and Compute for training purposes, eliminating expensive hardware costs.
OORT’s Products and Services
As we touched on, OORT offers a suite of AI-tailored services that people can use to augment businesses, reduce costs, and enhance usability. They include:
1) OORT Storage
OORT’s decentralized cloud data storage segment, OORT Storage, is an innovative solution that’s scalable, cost-effective, and secure. The service is compatible with AWS S3 systems, making it easy to integrate into established businesses. Despite being a premium service offering many cost and efficiency benefits, OORT Storage has a free tier with relatively generous limits for people to test and experience its benefits first-hand.
Instead of having centralized servers/storage spread over, at most, a handful of locations, OORT Storage leverages the blockchain to create a distributed storage network that spans the globe. People contribute unused storage to earn rewards, while businesses pay a fee to store their data in a secure and private way. The service follows this flow: data is segmented, encrypted, distributed, and then retrieved.
OORT Storage isn’t only innovative. It offers many real-world advantages. For example, because data is fragmented and spread across many devices, there is always redundancy, so data cannot be lost, which is ideal for sensitive information. Moreover, the service can offer cost savings of up to 80% compared to hyperscalers while still offering flexibility.
Nobody wants to lose essential data or pay excessive amounts for redundancy systems. OORT Storage solves these issues and easily integrates into S3 systems, making it a highly convenient solution. With it offering free and pay-as-you-go plans, OORT Storage is a robust service catering to both individuals testing cloud storage and enterprises handling big data.
2) OORT DataHub
Gathering high-quality, diverse, and reliable data is a significant challenge for enterprises training custom AI models. Often, data is incomplete or irrelevant and requires time-consuming pre-processing. OORT DataHub is a decentralized data collection platform that synergizes well with the company’s storage segment. It verifies data integrity, ensuring a quality dataset.
OORT incentivizes its global network of contributors to create high-quality datasets that are diverse and representative of real-world audiences. The data can be region-specific or generalized, depending on the client’s needs. A business can set up data collection campaigns based on its own parameters, which is more efficient when training models to handle a specific use case.
While some data collection services lack reach or quality, OORT DataHub has a network of more than 200,000 contributors across 136 countries, providing diverse and reliable data. The blockchain’s integration ensures transparency, while a Proof-of-Honesty consensus mechanism helps OORT verify data quality. People can use the platform to collect video, image, and audio data.
OORT DataHub is a particularly valuable service for companies requiring specific, high-quality data in a short timeframe, as its global network is expansive and highly active. It also provides an effective way for small and large businesses to gather data without having to find participants themselves.
3) OORT AI Agents
According to customer service statistics from BusinessDasher, the average customer service response time is 12 hours and 10 minutes, yet 46% of customers expect a response in under four hours. While these response rates can be challenging to achieve, custom AI agents offer a solution. They’re trained on a business’s data and can reply to queries instantly, 24/7.
OORT’s customer AI agents are robust automated support representatives. The team has focused on factual accuracy. Agents can be trained by linking to a website or uploading knowledge base/support documentation. After training, the AI agents can be easily embedded on a website or integrated with applications like Slack, WhatsApp, or Telegram.
Big players like Lenovo Image are already utilizing OORT’s agents, and for good reason. The service can achieve, on average, a 30% increase in business efficiency, a 40% reduction in operating costs, a 90% automation rate, and an outstanding 95% end-user satisfaction rate.
Effective customer service is crucial for any business, particularly online operations. However, hiring a dedicated team is costly, and outsourcing doesn’t guarantee quality. OORT’s AI agents are knowledgeable, always active, and come at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions, making them extremely attractive for businesses big and small.
4) OORT Compute
OORT Compute is a powerful service that will provide businesses and individuals with the computing power to train and fine-tune advanced AI models. It pools resources from contributors worldwide to create a network offering on-demand GPU resources. Although OORT is still developing this feature, the team expects it to launch in Q4 2025.
Similar to its other segments, OORT Compute will utilize the blockchain to create a Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN). Compute power is provided by contributors who earn rewards for sharing their unused hardware, while OORT manages the resources and distributes them as clients require.
DePIN networks like OORT Compute offer many notable advantages over traditional alternatives. Centralized systems involve high up-front hardware setup and maintenance costs, while OORT Compute involves no initial investment. Decentralized services can also generally continue running (albeit at a decreased rate), even if some nodes fail, guaranteeing uptime.
While the details surrounding OORT Compute are still being ironed out, the service’s value is apparent. It’ll drastically lower the barrier to creating custom AI models due to it reducing initial costs and being able to scale as demand dictates. It will benefit individuals or small teams aiming to build innovative applications as well as larger businesses in industries like technology, healthcare, and finance, which leverage AI models to enhance their systems and processes.
Why Should You Choose OORT
In contrast to other services, which are either centralized or focus on a particular segment, OORT offers a comprehensive suite of AI services encompassing data gathering, information storage, and model training. As such, OORT is ideal for businesses wishing to limit their use of multiple intermediaries, which can add to operation costs and increase integration complexity.
As we have touched on, OORT offers substantial cost savings (up to 80%) compared to centralized infrastructure services. However, it can also connect with platforms like Telegram and management tools like Rclone or Dropshare, making it more straightforward to integrate OORT than other tools.
While there are existing decentralized solutions for certain things like data storage (Filecoin) or rendering (Render Network), OORT’s integration of multiple services essential to AI workloads uniquely positions it as a powerful and robust decentralized AI infrastructure provider catering to individual users and businesses.
With OORT offering comprehensive AI infrastructure services and cost savings versus traditional providers, it’s no surprise the project has garnered support from some big names. It raised over $10 million in funding from venture partners and received grants from Google and Microsoft, highlighting OORT’s authenticity and prospects.
Is OORT Secure?
OORT leverages industry-standard techniques to maintain a secure environment for users. Data is encrypted and stored securely, while the team uses a multi-sig wallet to control the OORT’s treasury. Leading blockchain security company Certik audited OORT and found no significant security risks affecting the project.
OORT’s decentralized approach also provides inherent security. The blockchain is transparent and immutable, so bad actors cannot falsify data. Moreover, by distributing resources across a broad network of nodes, OORT has eliminated any single point of failure and ensured its services can continue running even in the event of a partial outage, guaranteeing consistent service.
Final Thoughts
Artificial intelligence is one of the most prominent narratives in business today. The technology is becoming increasingly widespread and has found its way into industries like manufacturing, finance, and content creation. However, it can be costly and require significant investment to create a custom AI system, creating a substantial barrier that people must overcome.
OORT offers a solution. It is an innovative AI infrastructure provider that provides a comprehensive suite of services catering to information storage, data collection, and model training. Its decentralized nature helps to foster verifiability and transparency while helping OORT to offer savings of up to 80% compared to centralized competitors like AWS.
The OORT’s team designed its suite of services with flexibility in mind. It suits businesses big and small, as well as individuals wishing to build in a cost-effective way. While some projects compete with select OORT services, none are as comprehensive, cementing OORT as a leading cloud for decentralized AI.
