AL #001: Why Crypto Still Matters in 2023
You should build your next company in crypto
AI is here
The arrival of Large Language Models (the technology behind ChatGPT) has made several crypto Founders question their focus. Is crypto still the most important frontier in technology? What is the role of our industry now that AI is taking center stage?
Yes, AI is changing both how work is done and how companies need to position themselves going forward.
There are many ways to proxy this change (number of new AI start-ups, real productivity gains in different industries including developers as well as resurgent conversation around AGI).
Let’s consider the productivity angle as it is the most concrete.
In most larger companies today, spreadsheets are the primary vehicle for productivity used by finance departments, human resources departments, operations departments and other important business functions.
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet application developed in 1979. Here is a beautiful accounting spreadsheet built in VisiCalc.
While simple in its visual depiction, the fundamental architecture of rows, columns and cells is unchanged today. Here is the FTX balance sheet from last year:
That's 30 years of limited improvement.
Meanwhile, in only 3 years, ChatGPT has evolved from effectively unusable to being able to do anything from solving homework to supporting medical research.
Safe & Aligned AI
Extrapolating this trend presents a challenge we call “AI Safety & Alignment”.
But Alignment is mistakenly seen as a technical issue and applied often only to individual models.
For example, OpenAI's Safety team is proud that ChatGPT doesn't use swear words but does it matter when their model is now used to bootstrap and train open source variations of it?
Matt Clifford recently re-shared an important article from Paul Christiano on what failure looks like.
In short, Paul argues that the changes to society will be much more subtle but could amount to a complete rewiring of societal objectives and systemic manipulation.
The role of Crypto
Crypto is hard, precisely because we're trying to use technology to fix areas like government, finance and the creative industries that have similar negative adversarial system-level impacts.
Tarun Chitra has often argued that this is not accidental, crypto is the philosophical antidote to the way problems are framed and solved in AI research.
To summarize the current state of affairs: the legacy financial system operates largely uninterrupted. Decentralized crypto institutions (DAOs) still have very little governance power to help regular people and now we have a looming global AI Alignment issue.
There’s still so much work for us to do. Mike Wawszczak puts it eloquently:
In follow-up newsletters I’ll discuss how to tap into our collective mission and recent progress in underlying blockchain technology and translate them into meaningful product ideas.
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