This is an opinion editorial by Aleksander Svetski, author of “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” The Bitcoin Times and the “Remnant Series,” and head of growth and strategy at Lucent Labs.
I know, I know. Your Twitter feed has probably been drowning in threads and tips from AI bros who have discovered 99 ways for you to save 99 hours every week using ChatGPT or some other list of 99 AI apps.
I’m sick of it too. Trust me, especially considering that most of these AI “experts” were Web3 “experts” last year, NFT “experts” the year before and DeFi or crypto “experts” before that. Trend hopping at its finest.
That’s not to say there’s no value here to be found here. Somewhere beneath or behind the almost-deafening noise coming from these influencooors there is a possible paradigm shift, and a genuine set of use cases. We’ve seen some already, of course.
You can chat with these models to reason out a problem, you can summarize thoughts and ideas, find correlations between ideas, search for some information better than you could with Google and, of course, build more linguistically-functional chatbots. Perhaps the best use case thus far are the
OpenAI is busy guard-railing ChatGPT to such a degree that it spends more time apologizing and moralizing than it does answering actual questions.
Bard is, likewise, regurgitating the same kind of garbage, likely because it’s been neutered by “bias-removal” tools and toxicity filters.
These stupidities only serve to constrain people’s accepted thinking and speech, which results in a homogenization of thought. This can have two effects. In the worst case, so-called “safety concerns” lead to “approved AI” which ultimately leads to an internet that is accessed through chat filters with approved speech conditions. The alternative is if we push back and build alternatives. Their ignorance becomes our opportunity. While they focus on wokeness, we can build utility and authenticity.
Which brings me to my final point:
We’re In A Global AI Arms Race
The race is between two versions of the world:
- On the one hand, we have woke, generalist AIs that everyone is forced to use because newly-formed regulatory bodies deem them “safe” (see the ridiculously-moronic work being done by Gary Marcus to set up such a global committee).
- On the other, we have a future of distributed, more sovereign tools that people can choose from, that the user evaluates on merits they deem important.
I know which future I want to see, and instead of sitting on the sidelines complaining, I’m working toward building alternative or parallel solutions.
In a future article, I’ll lay out what myself and a few really talented individuals have been working on. A beautiful marriage of Bitcoin as the focal point and Ai as the engine.
In the meantime, know this: The battle lines have been drawn.
It’s iris-scanning, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) like World Coin on one end, conveniently run by the same leadership as OpenAI, versus Bitcoin and smaller, more accurate, specialized and open-source language models on the other.
We all have to make a choice about the kind of world we want to live in. Woke madness, or awakened sanity? Mainstream and generalized, or local and specialized?
In my next piece, I will present a potential solution, or at least a way forward. Until then, think deeply about what I have said. Don’t get flustered by all the hype. Remain steady in your conviction, remain vigilant with the narratives being pushed and be ready for the next battle — because it’s coming.
This is a guest post by Aleksandar Svetski, founder of The Bitcoin Times and The Amber App, author of “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” “Authentic Intelligence” and the up-coming “Bushido Of Bitcoin.” Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.