We believed that crypto was going to profoundly transform the web that we have known until now. VS‘was the promise of Web3. There will definitely be a transformation. But this will probably come much more from advances in artificial intelligence than from those of the “blockchain”. The success of ChatGPT, which brought together several million users in a few days, is very instructive. Now millions of users are consciously interacting with AIs and admiring its demiurgic power, where crypto is still seen as a useless scam.
2022: a pivotal year for AI
Far from crypto scammers (SBF, Do Kwon…), ever more exotic scams (Stepn and company) and false promises (Solana…), 2022 has been a pivotal year for artificial intelligence. The breakthroughs have been significant and people are feeling more and more comfortable with AI, so they trust it more. Are we at the dawn of a new technological era embarking in the joy of millions of people towards increasingly advanced AI?
Slab-2: from text to image
The OpenAI company responsible for developing AI that benefits humanity and is aligned with our values has published two very promising programs: Slab-2 and ChatGPT. People loved playing with these programs.
First, this summer with Dalle-2, a model that allows you to cCreate images from text descriptions. “Draw me a pink elephant on a bicycle in Paris. And presto, an AI generates a more or less more realistic image. Many users were fascinated by the new powers they had just acquired thanks to AIs exploiting natural language processing techniques. Like Jesus who turned water into wine at Cana, Dalle-2 allowed us to transform text into images.
Dalle-2, which will one day be available in “open source”, could well transform our use of the web and more broadly our economy. It’s concrete, we see the usefulness: photo editing, advertising, digital art…
ChatGPT: Google soon to be obsolete?
Again, we can thank OpenAi for their publication of the program ChatGPT which sparked euphoria on social media like Twitter and electrified the tech world. In a few days, more than a million users have used this great chatbot. We really have more and more limpression of communicating with a human being.
A true all-round assistant, ChatGPT allows you to write simple contracts, write a poem, argue about the benefits of organic farming or help you generate code to launch a new ERC20 shitcoin. Like a feeling of magic.
Yet, ChatGPT relies “only” on technology GPT3which is a large language model (LLM) that has existed since 2020. Such a program makes it possible in particular to predict from a probability calculation the future words of a sentence and thus to build sentences which could be thought by Human being. OpenAI engineers produced this feat by training the models on several terabytes of textual data.
Since ChatGPT is above all an improvement of GPT3 in order to produce more credible answers from a human point of view, we can expect that future versions based in particular on the arrival of GPT-4 next year can be even more revolutionary. This new version will probably have more parameters than GPT3 and will be more efficient in deep learning. Soon, a chat bot indistinguishable from human writers and easily passing the Turing test?
If Web2 and search engines allowed you to quickly find information and intelligently organize it to meet your query, the Web3 on AI steroids just might allow you to explain the world to yourself incredibly effectively.
AI will increase our productivity tenfold
AI will bring us new tools to significantly improve our productivity and reduce the cost of creating new content.
tools like AlphaCode, which is developed by DeepMind (Google) today manages to produce code as good as an average developer. We can also mention GitHub Copilot. This is software that helps developers automatically complete their code based on what they have already written. It will become a lot more affordable to write simple computer programs thanks to our AI assistant built into the development tools. Presumably, there will be more and more programmers and writing elementary code may well become a skill as basic as using word processing software.
Productivity tool Notion recently announced the integration of a “writing assistant that can help you write, brainstorm, edit, summarize and more”. Again, users will save a lot of time and more easily achieve quality written content. In a few years, it will be enough to write only very brief bullet points and wait for an AI to complete them in order to obtain clear and concise paragraphs.
This productivity gain will also concern artists, who can begin by describing verbatim their artistic goal and wait for an AI to submit a proposal to them. IThey will then only have to iterate and manually correct the imperfections of the drawing. tools like PlaygroundAI will save artists a lot of time.
In short, in this web3, the human will give the creative impetus to the AI which will make proposals that the human will perfect. We will soon have new powers.
Vitalik and ChatGPT
Vitalik couldn’t resist using ChatGPT and he too played with OpenAI’s program.
“The GPT-3 chatbot has been useful as aprogramming help, but he also made many mistakes. In the end, I was able to overcome these errors quickly because I had a good knowledge of the domain.
At this point, AI is quite far from being able to replace human programmers. In this specific case, it only speeded me up a bit: I could have found solutions with Google, and in fact, in one or two places, I went back to Google. That said, I discovered code patterns that I had never seen before. For the classic operation of writing the JavaScript to send a simple transaction, it did well.
That said, the AI is improving rapidly and I expect it to continue to improve.», Vitalik Buterin.
VCs will jump ship Web3 to return to AI
Let’s not forget that the last bull market has been greatly amplified by the colossal investments of the venture capital funds in blockchain and web3. Many VCs who had just discovered blockchain and its ability to create cash quickly through token issuances were taken from FOMO.
But the euphoria began to descend. They begin to understand that the blockchain is a database architecture extremely inefficient for launching applications and that only those that have a burning need to resist censorship (like currency with bitcoin) require such a structure.
Watch Marc Andreessen (the one who has sponsored dozens of Ponzis lately) having fun for several days with ChatGPT.
It is to be expected that the AI will once again become the center of attention of venture capital funds whose business is to enter at the beginning of a wave, to surf it for 3-5 years, then to come out again to look for a new fledgling technology. Blockchain projects will undoubtedly have much more difficulty finding funding in the years to come.
This is undoubtedly good news for the ecosystem. All this free money injected into the machine created noise that prevented us from understanding the real usefulness of the blockchain: build censorship-resistant protocols and maybe tomorrow that improve the privacy in cyberspace.
A Web3 that neglected users
Beyond the absence of concrete use cases, Web3 is characterized by applications that give the impression of having been created without considering the user experience. Web3 is now a web that directly offers the function, without creating a full experience to lead the user to this function. A web made by experts for experts. Not to mention the incomprehensible jargon that tries to camouflage the lack of usefulness with impressive terms like move-to-earn or NFT.
The real Web3 is not a more complex web where you have to interact with dozens of tokens and pay transaction fees for each action. On the contrary, it will be a web that will allow us to go faster, through ever more elegant interfaces and to accomplish more complex tasks (like writing code or digital art) in an extremely simple way. This will probably happen thanks to our AI assistants and not thanks to the blockchain, which has another useessentially monetary.
Web3 will no longer be decentralized unless that it allows for simpler, more elegant applications and, more broadly, a much better user experience. We all love the open, anarchist, acephalous, unfettered web, but the majority will still prefer fluidity over privacy.
It is for this reason that the open Web1 has mutated into Web2 made up of closed platforms: the UX was better. Even today, anyone can run a server, host their emails, their blog… But no one does, because it’s absolutely impractical. The cost of obtaining such sovereignty exceeds that of the loss of privacy.
What contributions of blockchain to Web3?
As we have seen, it seems that AI has a much greater transformative capacity for the web than blockchain. Nevertheless, the latter could however have some use.
The decentralized nature of this technology ensures thatan action was performed as expected (thanks to a clever balance between game theory and cryptography) and that all parties have access to similar information. One can then imagine complementarities between the two technologies.
“AI makes it possible to tamper with everything online. But cryptography allows us to determine what is real. »
For now, apart from the monetary use case (bitcoin has demonstrated that it can be a censorship-resistant value), blockchain has yet to show interest in positively changing the web. But let’s keep hope, the basic protocols (layers 2/3 on Ethereum and Bitcoin) are not really ready yet. It may well be that solutions like RGB where the Zero Knowledge Proofs have many happy surprises in store for us in the years to come.
Web3 will be more likely to be the result of further AI acceleration than blockchain contributions. It’s our mistake. In 2022, apart from the monetary question, the greatest contribution of the blockchain is above all to provide a narrative: to build a more confidential web, more respectful of the privacy of users and their data. A narrative, but few concrete applications. What could also be called cypherpunk combat.
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