The AI Wars, Wins & Challenges in Web3, 5 Things to Do, & More
Discover more from Future Essentials
The AI Wars, Wins & Challenges in Web3, 5 Things to Do, & More
FUTURE OF THE WORLD - Edition 28
Hey everyone,
These days, it seems the entire world changes every week or even faster.
This edition will get you caught up on the latest in AI and web3, and give you tips for how to remain human during times of rapid change and transformation.
Enjoy the read and have a great weekend!
Misha
Here’s what you’re getting today:
How to deal with change, challenges, or crisis
Wins and challenges for web3 and crypto
The AI wars continue
5 things to do
How to deal with change, challenges, or crisis:
With all the changes in tech, banking, geopolitics, climate change, and everything else, staying sane, calm, and focused is crucial.
Here are some steps to take:
Web3 & Crypto:
It was another wild week in web3. Great things are being built, but there are challenges with the SEC’s continued regulation by enforcement.
I’ve been thinking about Carlota Perez’s technological surge cycle, and how it applies to web3 and crypto.
How does the Exponential Age, with its converging technologies and rapidity of growth, impact Carlota’s phases and periods?
Will some components now play out in tandem?
Will the different periods become shorter or more explosive?
Are we in the ‘crash’?
I will be diving into this more deeply in a future edition.
Meanwhile, what we do know is that we need the implementation of comprehensive regulatory frameworks that ensure security, transparency, and fairness while fostering innovation.
This tweet sums up the current vibe in web3:
Here are some of the positive developments this week:
Microsoft is building a cryptocurrency wallet for its Edge browser.
The software giant has been testing the Microsoft Edge built-in crypto wallet internally in recent months, with plans to eventually ship it to consumers.
Here are some early pics:
Get the full story here: Microsoft is building a cryptocurrency wallet into its Edge browser - The Verge
Zero Knowledge EVMs (ZkEVMs) are all the rage.
Zero-knowledge (ZK) is a type of technology that uses cryptography to help increase the speed of transactions, and to reduce gas fees on blockchains. Multiple companies are rushing to bring the innovation to the Ethereum ecosystem, seen by industry observers as likely to be one of this year's hottest blockchain trends.
ZkEVMs are virtual machines that can execute the same high-level programming languages or low-level bytecode as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and prove this code using zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic proofs that verify data without revealing any information about the data itself, such as properties or content.
Consensys, Polygon, and Matter Labs are all releasing ZK-rollups this year. These are exciting and powerful developments for web3.
Learn more:
ZkSync’s EVM ‘Era’ Opens to the Public - Blockworks
Want to learn about ZK technology?
Here’s the best resource:
Zero Knowledge Canon, part 1 & 2 - a16z crypto
NFTs for real estate transactions.
Roofstock has sold off a Georgia home to RealT via a tokenized Ethereum-based NFT. The transaction netted $214,882 in under three minutes.
Here’s how it went:
670 unique token holders snapped up a total of 722 orders
The blockchain transaction process took two minutes and 46 seconds
The average ether (ETH)-based purchase equated to about $298.
Atlanta Home Tokenized on Ethereum, Nets $214,882 in Under 3 Minutes - Blockworks
There are currently three Roofstock homes on OpenSea.
This easy of transaction is wild and gives us a taste of what’s to come in web3 real estate.
Want to learn more about NFTs for real estate?
NFT Real Estate: Everything You Need to Know in 2023 — Tokenized
The AI Wars Continue:
Google releases Bard.
On Tuesday, Google tentatively stepped off the sidelines as it released a chatbot called Bard. The new A.I. chatbot will be available to a limited number of users in the United States and Britain and will accommodate additional users, countries, and languages over time.
Google Releases Bard, Its Competitor in the AI Chatbot Race - The New York Times
Here’s Google CEO, Sundar Pichai’s tweet with the announcement:
Google is cautiously calling Bard a complement to search, not a search engine. Sissie Hsiao, a VP of product at Google and one of the Bard leads called Bard a “creative collaborator” and didn’t seem bothered when Bard got a newsy query wrong. The way she sees it, “Bard is really here to help people boost their imagination and their productivity.”
Here’s the take from The Verge:
OpenAI drops ChatGPT plugins.
In line with our iterative deployment philosophy, we are gradually rolling out plugins in ChatGPT so we can study their real-world use, impact, and safety and alignment challenges—all of which we’ll have to get right in order to achieve our mission.
Users have been asking for plugins since we launched ChatGPT (and many developers are experimenting with similar ideas) because they unlock a vast range of possible use cases. We’re starting with a small set of users and are planning to gradually roll out larger-scale access as we learn more (for plugin developers, ChatGPT users, and after an alpha period, API users who would like to integrate plugins into their products). We’re excited to build a community shaping the future of the human–AI interaction paradigm.
Plugin developers who have been invited off our waitlist can use our documentation to build a plugin for ChatGPT, which then lists the enabled plugins in the prompt shown to the language model as well as documentation to instruct the model how to use each.
The first plugins have been created by Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier.
Here’s CEO Sam Altman’s tweet announcing the rollout:
Microsoft releases the Bing Image Creator.
I tried it out and created this with the prompt: a stick figure dancing in the rain with an iphone.
You can try it here: Create images with your words - Bing Image Creator comes to the new Bing - The Official Microsoft Blog
NVIDIA unveils AI Foundations.
The age of enterprise AI has come crashing down upon us in recent months. Public infatuation with ChatGPT since its release last November has opened the floodgates of corporate interest and set off an industry-wide land grab with every major tech entity vying to stake their claim in this burgeoning market by incorporating generative AI features into their existing products. Heavyweights including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Baidu are already jockeying their Large Language Models (LLMs) for market dominance, while everybody else, from Adobe and AT&T to BMW and BYD, scrambles to find uses for the revolutionary technology.
NVIDIA's newest cloud services offering, AI Foundations, will allow businesses lacking the time and money to develop their own models from scratch to "to build, refine and operate custom large language models and generative AI models that are trained with their own proprietary data and created for their unique domain-specific tasks."
Here’s the full story from Engadget: NVIDIA unveils AI Foundations, its customizable Gen-AI cloud service | Engadget
Databricks releases Dolly to democratize AI.
It’s designed to democratize ChatGPT with open models. So vital!
Today we are introducing Dolly, a cheap-to-build LLM that exhibits a surprising degree of the instruction following capabilities exhibited by ChatGPT. Whereas the work from the Alpaca team showed that state-of-the-art models could be coaxed into high quality instruction-following behavior, we find that even years-old open-source models with much earlier architectures exhibit striking behaviors when fine-tuned on a small corpus of instruction training data. Dolly works by taking an existing open source 6 billion parameter model from EleutherAI and modifying it ever so slightly to elicit instruction following capabilities such as brainstorming and text generation not present in the original model, using data from Alpaca.
Hello Dolly: Democratizing the magic of ChatGPT with open models (databricks.com)
In other AI developments.
Content generated by artificial intelligence - including AI writers like ChatGPT and image-generating tools like DALL-E 2 - can now be copyrighted if they meet certain criteria, according to the US Copyright Office.
Until now, the Copyright Office has only considered human-generated work for copyright applications, however, in a shocking turn of events it will now consider AI-generated content so long as a significant proportion of the work was also carried out by a human.
Full story here:
AI generations can be copyrighted now - on one condition | TechRadar
Meanwhile, in a strongly worded thread, the Writers Guild makes it clear that it will not resist any attempt by companies to use AI to undermine the livelihood of writers.
5 Things to Do:
TRY:
This is wild and fun! Universe Splitter | Aerfish
Tough decision?
There's no need to choose --
Split the universe and do both!
Scientists have good reason to believe that every quantum event plays out simultaneously in every possible way, with each possibility becoming real in a separate universe. You can now harness this powerful and mysterious effect right from your iPhone or iPad!
How? Whenever you're faced with a choice — for example, whether to accept a job offer or to turn it down — just type both of these actions into Universe Splitter©, and press the button.
Universe Splitter© will immediately contact a laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and connect to a Quantis brand quantum device, which releases single photons into a partially-silvered mirror. Each photon will simultaneously bounce off the mirror and pass through it — but in separate universes.*
Within seconds, Universe Splitter© will receive the experiment's result and tell you one of the two actions to take. (Meanwhile, you will also be told to take the other action -- but that will happen in a separate branch of the universe.) After you've competed the action(s), your two timelines will begin to diverge.*
READ:
Microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything—from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market—runs on chips.
Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America's victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. But here, too, China is catching up, with its chip-building ambitions and military modernization going hand in hand. America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, contributing not only to a worldwide chip shortage but also a new Cold War with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap.
WATCH: Why Having Fun Is the Secret to a Healthier Life | Catherine Price | TED
Have you had your daily dose of fun? It's not just enjoyable, it's also essential for your health and happiness, says science journalist Catherine Price. She proposes a new definition of fun -- what she calls "true fun" -- and shares easy, evidence-backed ways to weave playfulness, flow and connection into your everyday life.
PRACTICE: Mindful Walking Meditation (20-Minute Guided Practice)
Take a mindful stroll outside with this simple 20-minute guided walking meditation practice. We'll work through ways to practice mindfulness during your walk and help you clear your mind.
JOIN ME: Become a Web3 Leader
Join my life-changing cohort-based course.
You will meet top web3 experts, get to know a group of dynamic learners from around the world, and spend 3 days becoming a leader of the future.
This course has a 9.9 rating and sells out every time.
Here’s what someone from the last cohort said:
Misha’s course is a “no brainer” for anybody wanting to level up their web3 game or aspiring to become a leader in the space. The course includes fascinating insights from major industry players that you won’t find anywhere else.
In addition to her outstanding content, Misha’s enthusiasm, and passion for web3 is infectious. She works extremely hard to mentor her students with practical, actionable, and effective advice.
I started the course with little if any Twitter experience. Within a few weeks of taking the course and implementing the steps I learned, I had several of the top people in web3 following me on Twitter and sharing my writing.
Ready to join me?
Check it out here. The course runs March 29 - 31.
PS: Most people expense the course through their company. Invest in yourself and let them pay ;).
If you share it on social media, tag me on Twitter so I can thank you.
The AI Wars, Wins & Challenges in Web3, 5 Things to Do, & More
I’m excited for the course!
An awesome update! Thank you!