AI vs Humans, An Encounter at Erewhon, the Technologists Already Working in 2030, & More
Future Essentials - Edition 51
Here’s what you’re getting in this edition:
A note from me
My thread for this week
10 news articles worth reading
What are Dynamic NFTs (dNFTs)?
A PODCAST: Financial Freedom, Company Building, More
OpenAI responds to authors claim generative AI is just a "grift" that repackages original works
AI vs. Humans: Which Performs Certain Skills Better?
A.I.’s un-learning problem
A Guided Meditation for Success, Wealth and Happiness
A POLL
A note from me
Yesterday, at this trendy food store in Los Angeles, I started chatting with a smart-looking person, and asked them some questions.
Here’s how it went:
Do you know what web3 is? - NO
Do you know what crypto is? - YES
Have you ever bought crypto? - NO
Do you know what NFTs are? - YES, my ad agency helps clients with NFTs.
Have you ever bought an NFT? - NO
Do you know what ChatGPT is? - YES
Have you used it? - YES, once.
It was a little disconcerting but not surprising. Afterall, I am immersed in researching these new technologies while most people are busy living their lives.
That said, I left the encounter thinking that something was not quite right.
Tech movements fail entirely, when it comes to communicating with the public. And the public are negligently oblivious to the imminent disruptions exponential technologies are bringing their way.
This needs to change!
I did a short Tweet about the encounter; the comments are useful.
My thread this week: A small group of the smartest technologists are already working in 2030.
When I regard technologists, I see very smart, highly driven people who are busy architecting the future we will all live in.
In web3, we’re lucky to have great technologists and leaders—people who actually care about building infrastructure and tools for a better world for everyone.
But we should not sit on the sidelines and rely on them to design our collective future. We must get in the game and join them. We can’t let the future happen to us. We need to be a part of shaping it!
Click on the image to dive in.
10 articles from this week that are worth reading
Swift unlocks potential of tokenisation with successful blockchain experiments | Swift
Colorado DMV taps PayPal to facilitate crypto payments - Blockworks
TradFi, DeFi convergence continues through tokenizing real-world assets - Blockworks
Reaching a billion users is 'the wrong goal' for crypto, says former Tinder VP - Blockworks
Is it safe to charge my phone at a public charging station? - Vox
High-speed AI drone beats world-champion racers for the first time | Ars Technica
How Better Tech Could Save Lives in a World of Bigger, Faster, More Devastating Fires - WSJ
What are Dynamic NFTs (dNFTs)?
A dynamic NFT is an NFT that can change based on external conditions. Change in a dynamic NFT often refers to changes in the NFT’s metadata triggered by a smart contract. This is done by encoding automatic changes within the NFT smart contract, which provides instructions to the underlying NFT regarding when and how its metadata should change. LINK
A PODCAST: Financial Freedom, Company Building, More | web3 with a16z crypto
A wide-ranging conversation on company building, big to small (including what cadence and when is the right "time" to ship); the relationship between centralization, decentralization, platforms, and financial freedom; moving from web2 to web3 in both crypto AND payments; why bitcoin, views on remote work, and much more. LINK
OpenAI responds to authors claim generative AI is just a "grift" that repackages original works.
This week, OpenAI finally responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors—including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey—who earlier this summer alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on pirated copies of their books.
In OpenAI's motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits), the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at "a later stage of the case."
The authors' other claims—alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment—need to be "trimmed" from the lawsuits "so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability," OpenAI argued.
OpenAI claimed that the authors "misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence." LINK
AI vs. Humans: Which Performs Certain Skills Better?
With ChatGPT’s explosive rise, AI has been making its presence felt for the masses, especially in traditional bastions of human capabilities—reading comprehension, speech recognition and image identification.
In fact, in the chart it’s clear that AI has surpassed human performance in quite a few areas and looks set to overtake humans elsewhere. LINK
A.I.’s un-learning problem
An A.I. model isn’t just lines of coding. It’s a learned set of statistical relations between points in a particular dataset, encompassing subtle relationships that are often far too complex for human understanding. Once the model learns this relationship, there’s no simple way to get the model to ignore some portion of what it has learned.
“If a machine learning-based system has been trained on data, the only way to retroactively remove a portion of that data is by re-training the algorithms from scratch,” Anasse Bari, an A.I. expert and computer science professor at New York University, told Fortune.
The problem goes beyond private data. If an A.I. model is discovered to have gleaned biased or toxic data, say from racist social media posts, weeding out the bad data will be tricky. LINK
Guided Meditation for Success, Wealth and Happiness
Start meditating every day for just 10 minutes. You will see how quickly it changes your life.
A POLL: Which would you prefer that I do?