AI and crypto isn’t just a buzz phrase
AI Eye has been out and about at Korean Blockchain Week and Token2049 in Singapore over the past fortnight, trying to find out how crypto project leaders plan to use AI.
Probably the most well-known is Maker founder Rune Christensen, who essentially plans to relaunch his decade-old project as a bunch of sub-DAOs employing AI governance.
“People misunderstand what we mean with AI governance, right? We’re not talking about AI running a DAO,” he says, adding the AI won’t be enforcing any rules. “The AI cannot do that because it’s unreliable.” Instead the project is working on using AI for coordination and communication — as an “Atlas” to the entire project, as they’re calling it.
“Having that sort of central repository of data just makes it actually realistic to have hundreds of thousands of people from different backgrounds and different levels of understanding meaningfully collaborate and interact because they’ve got this shared language.”
Near founder Illia Polosukhin may be better known in AI circles as his project began life as an AI startup before pivoting to blockchain. Polosukhin was one of the authors of the seminal 2017 Transformer paper (“Attention Is All You Need”) that laid the groundwork for the explosion of generative AI like ChatGPT over the past year.
Polosukhin has too many ideas about legitimate AI use cases in crypto to detail here, but one he’s very keen on is using blockchain to prove the provenance of content so that users can distinguish between genuine content and AI-generated bullshit. Such a system would encompass provenance and reputation using cryptography.
“So cryptography becomes like an instrument to ensure consistency and traceability. And then you need reputation around this cryptography, which is on-chain accounts and record keeping to actually ensure that [X] posted this and [X] is working for Cointelegraph right now.”
Sebastien Borget from The Sandbox says the platform has been using AI for content moderation over the past year. “In-game conversation in any language is actually being filtered, so there is no more toxicity,” he explains. The project is also examining its use for music and avatar generation, as well as for more general user-generated content for world-building.
Meanwhile, Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer outlined four main use cases for AI, with the most interesting by far training up AI models and then selling them as tokens on-chain. As luck would have it, Frameworks has invested in a game called AI Arena, in which players train AI models to compete in the game.
Keep an eye out for in-depth Magazine features outlining their thoughts in more detail.
AI is for communists?
Speaking of AI and crypto, are they pulling in opposite directions? Dynamo Dao’s Patrick Scott dug up PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s thoughts on AI and crypto in his forward to the re-release of the 1997 non-fiction book The Sovereign Individual, which predicted cryptocurrency, among other things. In it, Thiel argues AI is a technology of control, while crypto is one of liberation.
“AI could theoretically make it possible to centrally control an entire economy. It is no coincidence that AI is the favorite technology of the Communist Party of China. Strong cryptography, at the other pole, holds out the prospect of a decentralized and individualized world. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.”
From Peter Thiel’s new 2020 preface to The Sovereign Individual. pic.twitter.com/cWzfgyUqfY
— Patrick Scott | Dynamo DeFi (@Dynamo_Patrick) September 17, 2023
Roblox lets users build with AI
Roblox has unveiled a new feature called Assistant, which will let users build virtual assets and write code using generative AI. In the demo, users write something like “make a game set in ancient ruins” and “add some trees,” and the AI does the rest. It’s still being developed and will be released at the end of this year or early next year. The plan is for Assistant to one day generate sophisticated gameplay or make 3D models from scratch.
Terrible workers benefit most from AI
The worst workers at your place of employment are likely to benefit the most from using AI tools, according to a new study by Boston Consulting Group. The output of below-average workers improved by 43% when using AI, while the output of above-average workers improved by just 17%.
Interestingly, workers who used AI for things beyond its current abilities performed 20% worse because the AI would present them with plausible but wrong responses.
Google Gemini gears up for release
Google’s GPT-4 competitor is nearing release, with The Information reporting that a small group of companies has been given early access to Gemini. For those…
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