I don't feel well equipped to comment on AI. As an armchair observer, fundamental research and innovation seems to be extremely concentrated in megacorps—think NVDIA, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI. Startups using AI as a tool to build products are in a somewhat shaky position, at the mercy of some overlord that controls the underlying infra. With blockchains it's the opposite: research and innovation is distributed across many small and medium teams, and startups using blockchains as a tool to build products can enjoy sovereignty from the platform they build upon.

Now to answer your question about "the top 3 places", the number 1 place for startups and innovation is clearly Ethereum. Back when I joined the blockchain space 10 years ago that top place was Bitcoin. Unfortunately Bitcoin has since dropped the ball and is probably not in the top 3, even with recent innovation like BitVM. I'd probably give second place to "advanced applied cryptography"—SNARKs are an absolute revolution and blockchains are at the epicentre of it. An amazingly bullish fact is that advanced applied cryptography will extend far beyond SNARKs to include FHE, MPC, witness encryption, functional encryption, iO, one-shot signatures. Moon math has a bright future IMO in terms of research and innovation, with blockchains being the primary underlying motivator and driver. In position 3 I would go with "restaking" as another general category. Platforms like EigenLayer (see invocation #5 for an extended disclosure) seem to open up a whole new blockchain design space. It feels like there's significant low-hanging fruit and excitement for infrastructure that goes beyond vanilla smart contract-based dapps. Of course there is a risk that the hype won't stand the test of time which is why it's in a distant position 3. As a side note my state of mind as a restaking alignment researcher is to assume that restaking will be wildly successful so as to motivate exploring mitigations to systemic risks that this success could bring to Ethereum.