Thoughts on AI and Blockchain

Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain technologies are the two most trending technologies of the past couple of years. However, both technologies have fallen victim to overhype multiple times. I’ll be discussing my thoughts on these technologies.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence have been around for quit some time, I wrote my first model in 2018 but AI wasn’t popular among non-tech people at that time. ChatGPT was the first model (along with DALL-E 2 whose popularity didn’t last for long) to attract the general population’s attention. GPT-3 on which ChatGPT is based is a large language model (LLM) trained on 570 Gigabytes of text including books, webpages. This level of training is only possible at corporate level since it requires billions in investment for training and millions to keep it running.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is quit good in natural language, when the prompts are specific ChatGPT answers are impressive but we’ve to remember that ChatGPT is collection of those books and webpages on which it’s trained. When asked for opinions ChatGPT tends to hallucinate, because all those webpages and book authors have their own opinions on the matter. I asked ChatGPT to write emails for me, and I was impressed with its wording.

Github Copilot is another impressive tool which is only popular among software people. Copilot is a coding assistant tool, it suggests and auto completes code ( similar to auto-completing an email ). Like ChatGPT, Copilot is also based on GPT-3.

Limited Knowledge

If we ask ChatGPT “Who won Qatar world cup 2022” it won’t give any answer that’s because GPT-3 (model of ChatGPT) training was cutoff in 2021. Any events which happened after 2021 are not part GPT-3 training. To compete with Google, ChatGPT needs to have real-time access to all the webpages ( Just like Google ).

Future

I think we’re already in the early future of AI, models like StableDiffusion, arrival of GPT-4 and Whisper are hints to the future. Training and running these models still costs millions of dollars, but prices should decrease as hardware becomes cheaper. AI is never meant to replace humans, just to assist us so we humans can spend our time being productive rather than writing and reading lengthy emails.

Blockchain

First application of blockchain, “Bitcoin” was released in 2009, but a lot of people still haven’t been able to grasp the concept of blockchain. I won’t be discussing blockchain here but rather its applications.

Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies are digital tokens ( like in games ), some of them have actual value in real-world, while others don’t. With the rise of blockchain trend, some actors started manipulating people for their own benefits. Creating a cryptocurrency on blockchain is just two clicks away, these actors created cryptocurrencies with no real value, hype derived people into buying those cryptocurrencies and eventually these fake actors ran away.

Further there’s no constraints on cryptocurrencies. Theses currencies are traded openly, their value is decided by the market. So the price depends on simply supply and demand principle.

NFTs

Just like cryptocurrencies, NFTs are also tokens ( hence NFT is short for Non-fungible token ). NFTs should not be confused with images of apes. NFT can be anything including

• Spotify subscription
• Ticket to concert
• Music
• Video
• Image
• Anything

Like cryptocurrencies, the price is decided by market. But during the hype the price was most manipulated by the NFT creators or its owners. During initial sales, NFT creators would buy their own NFTs for million of dollars (spending nothing on NFT), attracting the audience, then selling them in millions.

NFTs should be purchased based on the utility they provide, a ticket to concert is utility, a Spotify subscription is utility, even an image is utility ( game skins, digital art ) but their prices should depend on their utility.

Current State and Future

The current state of blockchain is like 2000 of the internet. It should be because the technology is not accessible to common people. Account on blockchain requires knowledge of public key cryptography. A lot of people are unaware that the account on Binance and Coinbase are not blockchain accounts. If Binance is banned in your country, you could end up losing your assets.

But the blockchain community is passionate, working continuously to make user experience easier. I’m myself is working in the blockchain space and I’m optimistic we can make blockchain technology accessible to common people.