Each week, I share the most important news in Web3, AI, the pseudonymous economy & the forces shaping the future of humanity.

🪩 Join me on Discord 🪩

Artificial Intelligence

🚔 Cops try to stop self-driving car, find no one inside

This is both funny and a preview of the future: Feckless man against corporate machine. Human with guns versus unstoppable 2,000 robots that cannot be intimidated or jailed.

Here’s the big question: Was this a crime?

If a human was driving in this situation, this would be crime & the driver would either go to jail or––depending on the situation––get shot. Plenty of brown people have died for less.

Over the next 20 years, human institutions are going to have to figure out how to regulate & police robots. Robots neither feel pain nor fear death, so billy clubs & 9mm pistols are not going to do the trick.

If corporations are people, then are corporate robots above the law? Can a robot commit a crime? If a robot does it, is it always just an “accident”? Who is liable when robots violate the law? Will robot cars have a driving record?

These are not easy questions.

🧑‍🎨 Nervous about Midjourney, OpenAI announces DALL-E 2

This is just speculation, but I’m guessing that @sama saw all the Midjourney buzz and didn’t want to be left out, so decided to announce DALL-E 2, the 2nd iteration of OpenAI’s text-to-image engine.

However, according to my sources at OpenAI, it’ll be “a couple months” before the API goes into private beta. You can join the DALL-E 2 waitlist here.

Interesting thing to note: OpenAI claims that DALL-E 2 does not posses the ability to “generate violent, hate, or adult images.”

“By removing the most explicit content from the training data, we minimized DALL·E 2’s exposure to these concepts. We also used advanced techniques to prevent photorealistic generations of real individuals’ faces, including those of public figures.”

This is smart and IMO either

• easy – because the AI can’t actually do the thing they want to “prevent”

• difficult – because they probably have a gigantic dataset

Meanwhile, some people are more excited than others…

Personally, I’m rooting for Midjourney, but OpenAI has a definite distribution & capital advantage.

Web3

🧑🏾‍🎤 Facebook decides avatars are “investible”

The visionaries over at Facebook have come to realize that avatars are something that people will invest money in. Who knew!

I wonder if anyone in the Facebook C-suite owns a Cryptopunk or a Bored Ape? If I was Zuck, I’d force everyone to start buying NFTs.

The deeper problem, however, is that Facebook’s unique selling proposition as a social network is their real-name policy, which states:

Facebook is a community where everyone uses the name they go by in everyday life

Real names what made the Facebook network so revolutionary to begin with. Suddenly, for the first time, you could find real people on the internet, learn about them and connect with them. This was a very useful invention, but also created unexpected problems.

In 2011, Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic explained the problem in Why Facebook and Google's Concept of 'Real Names' Is Revolutionary…

The kind of naming policy that Facebook has is actually a radical departure from the way identity and speech interact in the real world. They attach identity more strongly to every act of online speech than almost any real world situation does.

We have different expectations for the publicness and persistence of a statement depending on a variety of factors. There is a continuum of publicness and persistence and anonymity. But in real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don't become part of the searchable Internet.

Online, Facebook requires an inversion of this assumed norm.

Facebook explicitly bans pseudonyms and has from day #1.

Pseudonyms enable privacy and obviously, in his heart of hearts, Zuck thinks privacy is bad.

Zuck even went on the record sounding like Chinese Communist Party member.

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

-Mark Zuckerberg, Founder/CEO of Facebook

Ergot, I don’t expect the Z man to change his mind on this anytime soon. More likely, he’ll try to shoehorn web3 into his real name metaverse.

However… Web3 is all about pseudonyms, going back to the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin: Satoshi Nakamoto.

Any Web3 platform that bans pseudonyms & alt-identities is DOA.

Unless Facebook is willing to abandon their founding principles––which is possible, though unlikely––the boys in Menlo Park are going to have a tough go of things in the new internet we’re all building.

🙈 OpenSea ‘Sitting on Ticking Bomb’ as lawsuits pile up

When buggy software meets a decentralized, immutable blockchain, bad things are bound to happen. Given that we live in America, bad things means lawsuits.

Will be interesting to see what insurance products get built to address this kind of software execution risk. Web3 companies will need it. Personally, I like the idea of a decentralized betting market instead of traditional insurance. I’m sure that Web3 will provide, eventually.

🎬 Coinbase bankrolls Bored Ape movie trilogy

BAYC continues to show who the true cultural visionaries are. From the news writeup:

The first of three installments for the series of animated short films, titled “The Degen Trilogy,” will premiere at NFT.NYC in June, with the NFT community of apes and non-apes alike having a say in parts of the film’s plot.

Bored Ape owners are invited to submit their apes for consideration as characters in the trilogy, along with made-up character descriptions that will be reviewed by an actual Hollywood casting director.

I just hope that their creative execution matches their clear ambition. Kudos to Coinbase for bankrolling the experiment. Will be fun to see. I am rooting for them!

🍟 Bored & Hungry BAYC Restaurant opens in Long Beach, CA

Free combo meal if you own $APE, Bored Ape and Mutant Ape or Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs. This is powered by a new-fangled technology called “Token Gating,” where a QR code is used to scan customers’ MetaMask wallets. Makes me hungry just thinking about it.

🏀 NBA buys NBA.eth ENS and files for 4 NFT trademarks

Looks like the National Basketball Association has a crush on Web3. From the article:

The filing, submitted by the NBA for “The Association,” covers a laundry list of virtual items including “game tickets, game programs, trading cards, collectibles, memorabilia, jerseys” and even “memes relating to the field of basketball authenticated by non-fungible tokens.”

The league also appears to be in possession of two Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains – nba.eth and theassociationnft.eth

Politics

😱 Shanghai is losing it mind after a week of COVID total lockdown

Supply chains are shutdown and Chinese kitchens don’t have a lot of processed, shelf-stable foods that are common in the West, so a lot of people are going hungry. I’m not there so I can’t say for certain, but it looks like a lot of people are losing their minds.

The screams are eery, like out of a horror movie.

Luxury brands are even sending care packages to its customers.

It’s scary to consider, frankly. Big hugs to the people of Shanghai. I do not envy you.

Want to hear about these stories in real-time? Join me on Discord or follow me on Twitter.

-Pseudo1984

PS I’m testing out a new avatar. How do you like it?

Each week, I share the most important news in Web3, AI, the pseudonymous economy & the forces shaping the future of humanity.

🪩 Join me on Discord 🪩

The Pseudonymous Economy

🎙 MetaVoice: pseudonymous AI voice skin NFTs

After graduating from Entrepreneur First (the best accelerator in Europe), Metavoice is using deep learning to develop the first voice skin NFTs. Early, but promising. Here’s a demo:

Practically-useful voice changing is critical infrastructure for the pseudonymous economy. Not an easy problem, especially when you need deep learning to work real-time in an unconstrained consumer environment!

But they are not the first to tackle voice-to-voice transformation:

• Modulate.ai tried this a few years ago as a B2B SDK for gaming, then pivoted

• Respeecher won an Emmy doing this for Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian

Team is solid––the CTO used to work on Alexa voices at Amazon––and EF has a very strong track record of incubating good companies. At my old job, I did a bunch of analyses on incubator portfolios and their’s was one of the best in the world.

If you’re an investor, they’re worth tracking. HMU if you want an intro. 💸

Artificial Intelligence

😜 Google PaLM get jokes, unlike GPT-3

Google just launched an NLP model called PaLM that’s even bigger than GPT-3 and actually groks humor. This shows that verbal intelligence is generalizing.

I expect progress to continue as well-funded AI labs throw ever-increasing amount of compute at the problem. Much to the delight of chipmaker NVIDIA, I am sure.

🧠 Memories are stored as discrete events in the brain

Lived experience is continuous, but you brain organizes memories as discrete events. From the paper in Nature Neuroscience:

These findings reveal a neuronal substrate for detecting cognitive boundaries that transform experience into mnemonic episodes and structure mental time travel during retrieval.

Fascinating how our mind works! As humanity furiously works to replicate itself inside a computer, I suspect that findings like this will inspire future AI research.

🚗 Waymo launches fully autonomous self-driving in San Francisco

Google finally ships an actual driverless car, at least for employee use. Personally, I’d still bet on Cruise. They are much hungrier.

Long term though, this all becomes a commodity. But will take a while.

✈️ FedEx to test autonomous drone flights next year

US airspace regulations that grandfather in old planes without location transponders make this a much harder problem than it should be. This interview with the founder of Zipline explains the problem really well. Kind of shocking, frankly.

Web3

🐥 Elon Musk buys 9.2% stake in Twitter & joins the board

This is good news for Web3. Twitter already launched a dedicated crypto team in November.

Hopefully Elon can do his magic at Twitter. Will be interesting to see what comes of this!

₿ Vitalik defends Bitcoin maxis

He makes quite an interesting argument, actually.

1. We live in a dangerous world, and protecting freedom is serious business

2. Currency is not "just the first app". It's by far the most successful one.

3. Focusing exclusively on being money makes for better money

4. In general, the earliest projects in an industry are the most "genuine"

5. Intolerance is good

6. Weird crusades against seed oils are good

7. Be a maximalist

His final section is worth quoting in (almost) full:

Be a maximalist

Maximalism is often derided in the media as both a dangerous toxic right-wing cult, and as a paper tiger that will disappear as soon as some other cryptocurrency comes in and takes over Bitcoin's supreme network effect. But the reality is that none of the arguments for maximalism that I describe above depend at all on network effects. Network effects really are logarithmic, not quadratic: once a cryptocurrency is "big enough", it has enough liquidity to function and multi-cryptocurrency payment processors will easily add it to their collection.

Crypto-assets like Bitcoin have real cultural and structural advantages that make them powerful assets worth holding and using.

Maximalism is not just Bitcoin-for-the-sake-of-Bitcoin; rather, it's a very genuine realization that most other cryptoassets are scams, and a culture of intolerance is unavoidable and necessary to protect newbies and make sure at least one corner of that space continues to be a corner worth living in.

It's better to mislead ten newbies into avoiding an investment that turns out good than it is to allow a single newbie to get bankrupted by a grifter.

It's better to make your protocol too simple and fail to serve ten low-value short-attention-span gambling applications than it is to make it too complex and fail to serve the central sound money use case that underpins everything else.

And it's better to offend millions by standing aggressively for what you believe in than it is to try to keep everyone happy and end up standing for nothing.

Be brave. Fight for your values. Be a maximalist.

Politics

🖕 European Union bans self-hosted cryto wallets

“Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.”

Frens, the freedom to transact is in grave danger. We must grow the #Web3 community & 💊 the masses as fast as we can, before it's too late. We are going to have to fight for crypto via

📥 ballot box
📣 legislature
🏛 In courts

Lawmakers are deciding the course of our future right now and they don't even know it. They think dealing with obscure technical details, not the future of human freedom.

🇨🇳 China Plans New Restrictions on Live-Streaming

The CCP is limiting virtual tipping of live-streaming hosts and time spent by young people on live-streaming apps. If only Mao had the great firewall.

Aside: If you’re interested in China, this interview with Marko Papic on Invest Like the Best is really good.

The three traps of China, one, it won't become energy efficient for the next decade. Two, over the next decade it's going to have to double down on exports and investment. And three, it's going to have to eventually depend on investors listening to this conversation giving them money.

A country that's not energy independent, that depends on exports and manufacturing growth, and depends on foreign capital is not a country that invades or is aggressive geopolitically. It's a country that's actually quite pacified. They're still going to be a power and they're still going to be a rival of the US, but I actually think that they are quite trapped.

🇬🇧 UK Treasury to regulate some stablecoins

Probably a good thing. Definitely better than banning wallets.

Want to hear about these stories in real-time? Join me on Discord or follow me on Twitter.

-Pseudo1984

Each week, I share the most important news in Web3, AI, the pseudonymous economy & the forces shaping the future of humanity.

🪩 Join me on Discord 🪩

The Pseudonymous Past

📜 Pseudonyms Wrote the US Constitution

America's founding fathers used pseudonyms to debate and ratify the United States Constitution during the 1880s.

Wikipedia lists 47 different "important" pseudonyms, including Publius publisher of the Federalist Papers, an alt identity collective comprised of:

• Alexander Hamilton – 1st Secretary of the US Treasury, founder of the US financial system and now pop culture meme 💵

• James Madison – 4th President of the United States 🇺🇸

• John Jay – 1st chief justice of the US Supreme Court 🏛

Power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.

- Publius, The Federalist Papers

This is the same argument made by Punk6529 in his “Freedom to Transact” epic. If you haven’t read the thread already, pls do. Defintely worth your time.

The similarity is uncanny. I wonder if Punk6529 has read the Federalist Papers?

If you are friends with 6529, pls share this with him.

Interestingly, Publius’s great intellectual rival was another pseudonym named Brutus, who was the 1880s version of a decentralization maxi. History rhymes, doesn’t it?

Vitalik is reviving this 250 year old debate, now in the Web3 context, with some incredible essays:

• The Meaning of Decentralization

• The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy

• Coordination, Good and Bad

All I gotta say is… What an incredible time to be alive! 🔥

Artificial Intelligence

🤯 Neural Implant Allows Paralyzed Patient to Communicate by Composing Words with His Thoughts

This is wild! Researchers got a guy who couldn’t even move his eyes to communicate by spelling out words in his mind one letter at a time . Shocking that it worked and even more shocking was how much the guy had to say! 🧠

🦾 Stratechery Interview with Nvidia CEO about “Manufacturing Intelligence”

None of these capabilities were remotely possible a decade ago. Accelerated computing, at data center scale, and combined with machine learning, has sped up computing by a million-x. Accelerated computing has enabled revolutionary AI models like the transformer, and made self-supervised learning possible.

AI has fundamentally changed what software can make, and how you make software. Companies are processing and refining their data, making AI software, becoming intelligence manufacturers. Their data centers are becoming AI factories.

The first wave of AI learned perception and inference, like recognizing images, understanding speech, recommending a video, or an item to buy.

The next wave of AI is robotics: AI planning actions. Digital robots, avatars, and physical robots will perceive, plan, and act.

- Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO

Jensen & I are on the same wavelength. His vision is spot-on. Inside of OASIS, we explain what we do as “AI manufacturing” and HUMAN-1 as our “factory.” Before now, I’d never heard anyone else use this metaphor. Wild!

Note: While Jensen’s vision is spot on, NVIDIA and OASIS are very different businesses. OASIS’s HUMAN-1 uses 10,000x less compute than NVIDIA’s Maxine avatar technology. Why? Maxine exists to help sell NVIDIA sell hardware; HUMAN-1 exists to sell AI video avatars to actual end-users as utility NFTs. NVIDIA’s goal is to maximize the compute need, OASIS’s is to minimize it.

💻 Nvidia teases ‘world’s fastest AI supercomputer

This will make AI research faster. The result will be more experiments, more discoveries, more breakthroughs. 👩‍💻

Web3

⛽️ Exxon is partnering with Crusoe to mine bitcoin in North Dakota as part of its plan to slash emissions

Crusoe pioneered the “use off gassing to power a data center” model and is expanding into the data center space (OASIS AI research is one of the first beta users.) It’s a brilliant model to transform waste. This is the way. 🔥

If I was Exxon, I’d just drop $3B and buy Crusoe. But they shouldn’t sell. 💰

💸 Crypto investor Katie Haun raises $1.5 billion, the largest debut fund ever by a female VC

Katie started off as federal prosecutor. Here’s her 2015 TED talk about being baptized into crypto:

👁 Sam Altman’s Worldcoin to Raise $100M at $3B Token Valuation

The technology looks legit, but their consumer marketing needs work. Bearish atm. 🌎

🙊 Yuga Labs Raises $450M from a16z, Google, Samsung

These guys are really running the table. Brilliant execution. 🚀

📱 LG Electronics adds blockchain and crypto as new areas of business

Probably too early, but who knows? 🧪

Want to hear about these stories in real-time? Join me on Discord or follow me on Twitter.

In the meantime… What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen this week?

-Pseudo1984

Each week, I share the most important news in Web3, AI, the pseudonymous economy & the forces shaping the future of humanity.

Here’s what I’ve seen this past week that has blown my mind…
-Pseudo1984

🪩 Join me on Discord 🪩

Artificial Intelligence

🤯 Midjourney launches text-to-art using AI diffusion

this is the coolest piece of technology I’ve seen in a long time!
-Pseudo1984

Politics

🌏 Balajis is writing a book on how to start a new country. Pre-order The Network State on Amazon.

🦾 South Korean president creates deepfake doppelganger to get youth vote

😳 Russia creates a deepfake video of President Zelensky announcing Ukrainian’s surrender

Web3

🎸 Universal Music label acquires Bored Ape NFT to lead virtual music group

🤑 Bored Ape Yacht Club launches ApeCoin ($APE), teases Otherside metaverse

👩‍💻 Two-thirds of US freelancers on Fiverr are servicing the NFT industry

📈 @Punk6529 on the cultural moment

🕳 Common pitfalls of Web3 founders

Want to hear about these stories in real-time? Join me on Discord or follow me on Twitter.

In the meantime… What do you think all this means? What are you seeing out there?

-Pseudo1984