Is AI part of web3?

Transcript

gmgm welcome back to another episode of web3 Academy your trusted source for relevant and legitimate web3 information so you don't fall behind the internet Revolution don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird and I'm joined by my co-host Kyle reidhead who's just back from a week of vacation happy to have you back Kai and I know that on his vacation Kyle was thinking that he believes in the future of web 3 and how it's going to change the world so that's why he's back with us this week and I'm here as well to guide the world's top talent down the rabbit hole as you participate contribute and capitalize on the opportunity good to be back I'm good to be back yeah I was gonna say you can

jump in if you want and say something about your vacay well I'm back from vacay but I'm still in Nicaragua so I took a week off when I got to Nicaragua and just surfed traveled around got on the motorbike and ripped down the coast and now I'm staying here for another month but of course my first day back to work the powers out I think we have a battery pack and solar but we're kind of going off the cuff here with this podcast but it's gonna be a good one this is a New Concept that we came up with about a month ago on the show where we debate now we've done two of these so far and we talked about nft rights we talked about Ai and what we found was in those first two we didn't debate very much Kyle and I we more tend to agree so

we're hoping that today is a little bit more of a debate that's what we're aiming for today we're going to be talking about is AI part of web3 now that might sound like a simple yes or no question but there's actually much more to it and what we're going to do is we're going to dive into the history of the web we're going to talk about really where we got to in probably the late 2019 2020 time of it was a point when we needed to look to the future of the web a few companies were controlling everything and there was no opportunity to step back and say okay how do we build a web that we're all excited about that gives us more access to information that helps us be more productive in our jobs and that's when we started to talk

about blockchain and then all of a sudden I blew up in the past six months and large language models in particular a piece of AI is really creeping into so many areas of the web and so today we're going to debate that where do larger language models fit into the future of the web where does AI fit in the future of web and is this all part of web3 what's our definition for web3 what does fit in at web3 and what does not it's a lot of semantics of if it's web3 or not I think the real thing we're trying to understand here is like what technologies are involved here in web3 what technologies are important for us to understand for us to use whether we're building businesses we're investing Etc and just also helping us

to understand where the internet is going I hear a lot of people are like web3 is now useless it's all AI you don't even need blockchain it's just like I think people need to understand how these Technologies work together and what it all means and I think that's really the outcome that we'll get from this episode hopefully that's great so if you're listening to us on Spotify we got a poll for you which is does web3 have to include ownership so make sure you scroll down answer that poll on Spotify and yeah excited to jump into today's debate before we do we just need to take a minute to hear from our sponsors who make the show possible the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the

epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to the profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graphing followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application education to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol

enables self-sovereignty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at Webster Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we've partnered with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today what if I told you that industry Pioneers from Flagship web 3 Brands such as consensus polygon binance Unstoppable domains Ledger and uniswap will all meet up in one place this summer you don't want to miss this I'm talking about the Epic web 3 conference taking place in beautiful Lisbon on the 9th of June with over 20 curated talks speed consultations with web3 experts networking sessions with investors and

even the opportunity to raise funds this conference has it all and you'll get the tools you need to succeed in this industry plus we at Webster Academy will attend it hosts a community Meetup with you in the other smart Community before the main event so come along meet us Network and start building alongside leading web 3 innovators we can't wait to meet you remember Lisbon Portugal 9th of June we've got a 15 discount for you but ticket prices go up every few days so get your tickets today by using the link in the show notes and to of the promo code web3 Academy 15 to secure your spot or if you become a pro member you can get an even bigger discount so GoPro today and we'll see you in Lisbon

Portugal the 9th of June at the Epic web 3 conference all right welcome back I'm going to start off today's debate by just giving a brief history of the web so we look back at web one which was roughly 1990 to 2005 so it's actually a 15-year period web one was read the web was just one-way communication basically we brought books and brochures and news articles all online then from 2005 to 2020 which is the rough timeline of web 2. web 2 was read and write web 2 is when users became creators with the Advent of social media mobile phones and incredible publishing

platforms we were all able to create content and post it online and then came this sort of inflection point this feeling that web2 had played itself out we were going from this incredible Social Web where we were all creating online and we were all part of it and we moved to a closed off controlled system by really a few major tech companies like Facebook so that kind of brought us to this point around 2020 when a whole bunch of nerds basically very smart people were thinking about like okay what is the future of the web as the world goes more

digital unless you're one of the few people that believe that we're gonna go more analog I don't think I need to convince anybody on this show about that as we go more digital what's next what's the next Evolution what's the next big phase of the internet and the predominant theory was that this would be around ownership so web 3 would be read write own and that really clear this was this is well before 2020. it's more about yeah about 2015. somewhere between 2015 to 2020.

yeah you're totally right right that was the theory however here we are in 2023 and adoption has been slow no web 3 or application of blockchain has caught Mass adoption yet other than crypto but crypto is really more of a monetary revolution rather than the future of the web yes it ties into the future of the web but it's more of a monetary Revolution also regulation has been causing a lot of issues which really especially this year is leading to a lot of businesses and developers wondering if blockchain is where they should be investing their time and where they should be investing their energy in contrast AI is having this moment

ai's rapid Improvement has led to the emergence of large language models and new behavioral interactions across the internet and these models have immense potential to revolutionize how we access information online for example even though products like chat GPT and gpt4 still in development they are already being used more than blockchain-based web3 products for practical day-to-day purposes I personally have gotten much more out of chat GPT than I ever did out of the ethereum virtual machine okay do you want to pause and do you want to jump in here you want me to keep going I mean I would say I definitely

financially I've done way better using the ethereum virtual machine that I had the guy so I'm gonna say that part but in day-to-day use of like normal life I understand where you're coming from that yes for sure important thing to understand was web 3 and this again is semantics in terms of definition though is like I don't think that web3 is just blockchain I think and we had what's your name through Avery yeah Canadian from 83 and I love her her definition which was that web3 is a a more personalized immersive and ownable internet and that's to me is what web3 is which means when you think of what that is that you have okay the ownable part of the internet that's blockchain technology the immersive part of the that's the metaverse technology VR AR Etc and the personalized is kind of a combination of blockchain so we can see

what's in your wall and we can give you things based off of what you've done on the internet but also in terms of AI because it can start to learn about you and give you experiences based off of like the things that you've done so I think it's a combination of a bunch of Technologies and I think blockchain is a massive massive part of it because as you said as we go more digital it becomes more important that we have some sort of digital rights which means ownership and so blockchain should be at the foundation of that but I do think web3 is more than just ownership I think there's a lot of new experiences and new ways that we're going to use the internet that I think most people are not wrapping their heads around just yet and that doesn't come from blockchain it

comes from VR AR AI Etc because like everything's in it but it's true I agree with what you're saying there is multiple pieces and I like that definition right so you have blockchain is a piece of web3 metaverse Slash immersive experiences is a part of web3 and advanced Computing is a part of web3 and you know what Jay even crypto is a part of web3 in a big way because again as we go more digital we need a digitally native financial instruments right whether that be money whether it be Equity whether it be governance whether that be nfts right non-fungible things we need all this stuff to to have a proper like Digital Life right and so I think that crypto plays a big part of

that as well I think we are seeing adoption of web3 as a result of that it's the biggest piece of blockchain that has caught on and create and has mass adoption and you need to consider within web3 particularly the blockchain part things like tokenomics and things like decentralization of your governance as you said I believe though that right now the future of the internet is going to be built by the developers and the VCS that decide where to allocate their dollars in the next decade and right now as a result of AI having more mass adoption and having an impact and when I say AI let me be more specific and say large

language models because really that's what chat gpt4 is that's what Chachi PT is a large language model which has the ability to converse with you in a way that you never could before you can converse with it and it can not in some ways this is still in development but with the release of plugins once these plugins have the ability to access kayak for flights and access Shopify for Commerce then you will be able to connect with the internet and with digital Assets in a way that you have not before and I believe that right now what is happening is we are seeing a

moment where we might steer in the direction of AI being the predominant Tech in web 3 over the next five years well blockchain use cases catch up because quite frankly blockchain is just it's been slow it's not having the adoption at the large scale that we all believe it will I'm not denying that it won't it will I just think that in this moment in time we are going to see large language models be the greatest impact on the web and on our day-to-day use of the web the greatest in the sense of like it's the most user-friendly right now like people can use it and you can

get result from it right now and it can help you you know build content he can help you write code it can help you do so many things so like it makes everyone more efficient it turns every human that uses it into a superhuman I think that is a really big deal I think the AI is just another technology that is also growing and that's great you know you have AI That's growing and that's going to help make everything on the internet more efficient and happen faster and adoption occur much faster because things can get done much quicker right I think it's a good thing it's a net positive for blockchain technology for all other technology it's just it's all growing and we're all growing together so that exponential age that I talk about where each technology kind of feeds off another and we have Robotics

and VR and all this that's like all coming together and growing at the same time and they all support each other I would say you keep saying that web3 is slow adoption I wouldn't say it's necessarily slow it's adopting right now crypto in general is adopting faster than the internet itself did so I mean it's pretty fast it just comes in Cycles right if you were to ask this question in 2021 Jay you'd be like holy [ __ ] this thing's adopting like crazy you had every family and friend ever that knew that you were in the space coming and asking you like should I buy this monkey picture should I buy this token called whatever so I was like that was the moment that ai's having right now right I'm getting texts going hey do you use AI should I use AI I was getting that in

2021 about crypto and web 3. so it's just Cycles right and right now we happen to be in a cycle where web3 which is very financially driven is low right we're in kind of a bear Market people aren't making much money so people have left this space and AI though has just kind of came out it's in this hype cycle there's a million apps launching every day many of them are useless some of them are useful and so again it's kind of just a hype cycle now does that go away I'm not sure because it is actually so useful that like the hype probably goes away a little bit and right now every time you go on Twitter there's a new launch of a new app that probably slows down in the future for sure but I think the next time that prices start to

go up again in all markets I think again we're going to get the text messages hey should I buy ethereum should I be using lens should I be like whatever like it's gonna be the same thing we're gonna have tons of option to web3 it's just a cyclical nature I think and I think AI will probably be the same as well so I think the question is if you're a Creator if you're a business owner or if you're an entrepreneur every day you're overwhelmed by all the tech that is coming out you're impossible to stay on top of all of it right you feel this sense of like fomo you feel the sense of even worse than fomo like falling behind right even though you're trying to get keep up what do you focus on that's where this

leads to for me it's not the is what it is and what isn't a part of web three it's more where do you direct your energy and attention to capitalize on the opportunity to make sure that you don't fall behind to make sure that your business stays relevant that you stay relevant right I think one you want to understand things like this like where is it all going I think it's not like AI is now the future and just everything else stops there's no more VR there's no more blockchain like that's crazy right so I think if you're a Founder if you're an entrepreneur if you're a Creator you 100 should be all in right now trying to figure out how to use AI in your business because it's going to make you 10 to 100 x more efficient you'll won't need to hire certain people you can

create content you can build whatever it is you want so much faster so much easier with AI so like you need to be going down that rabbit hole and understanding that without a doubt I also think that like when I think further into the future of where the internet goes like blockchain technology is so neat and if we don't have it we're all [ __ ] right right like we think about web 2 and how bad it is of power of Google Facebook Etc right now and how much they control of the internet AI is going to put that power even further into like very very centralized entities that now have 10 100x thousand X more power than Google or Facebook ever could and if we don't have some sort of governance around that and decentralization around that then we don't want to live in the internet right

and also like when you think of especially if we're talking creators here with content if you have everyone creating content from Ai and I'm talking AI can already create all of your tweets all of your newsletters it can create all of your images it's already able to like create videos for you whether that's just audio or video and that is going to escalate a lot in the next six to 12 months you're just gonna have so much content we have no idea what's real what's fake and so the only way we can like control that and figure that out and make sure that we don't get this overwhelm of content is through blockchain because it will allow us to verify who's creating the content because anyone right now can take this podcast upload it into an app and I'm going to say the name because I

don't want you to go do this but you can upload it it'll learn what my face looks like and my voice and then you can write a script or use chat gbt to write a script and you can get a video of me explaining whatever the hell you want even something I've never said in my life before and you can go publish that on Twitter or wherever right and so like we can see where that becomes a really big problem with things like politics okay we got an election coming up in 20 yeah that's gonna be a big problem and so we need to know where did that piece of content originate and the only way to do that on the internet that's the entire purpose of blockchain Technology the only way to do that is using blockchain and so that's why this growth of web3 or sorry of AI in my opinion is

going to speed up the growth and Adoption of web3 of blockchain Technology specifically because we're going to need it and we're going to need it really really really fast yeah it certainly provides a ability to ensure Trust online which is the biggest thing we all struggle with this we talk about how blockchain Tech is trustless which is a confusing term it makes it sound like it's not trustworthy it actually means the trust is guaranteed essentially I've written an article about this previously what that has led to is everything fake news fake reviews and you don't know what you can trust you go on Amazon you're like oh should I buy this product it's got you know a hundred reviews and you read them and you're like these sound fake but you don't know right are they real are they fake there's no way to verify so I think

yes blockchain solves that my view is just that and I agree you know the long-term vision and it's important to understand that long-term Vision because as you said we're in this exponential age where all these techs are coming together at once and if you're not aware of them all then it's going to be tough to stay on top but I do think that right now if I was a business or I was a Creator and I was focused on using my resources wisely I didn't have all the resources in the world I can't have a team that does everything I would be more focused on AI right now than I would be on blockchain integrating into my business because I think AI is going to have more of an impact on your

business in the next six months then blockchain will do I agree with that I think AI in the short term in the next six months yes that is the most important thing you should be learning to use whether that's in your personal life or it's in your business life or it's your like employees or team getting them to understand how to use it yes I agree you can make a massive impact on there I mean it also probably depends on what your business is but I think that's extremely extremely important but I think also just understanding the fundamentals of web3 and blockchain like what that really means is really really important like now is the time to do that because again the way that I see it anyways like if you are in this Digital World which I believe is coming the

internet is becoming more like the physical world now that we can own stuff there are new requirements for the internet you don't just go on and click buttons and do things like now you've Everyone's an investor everyone is an owner right in the internet you use a technology and all of a sudden they just give you some tokens and now you're like voting on like where this technology should go everyone's a Creator it's like you've you become way more involved in the internet I think understand ending that also becomes really really important as well the thing is is that in my opinion we're likely to have the next cycle and hype cycle of web3 which means financially that opportunity is coming massively because look always great to help you become more efficient you can't invest in it you can't investment yeah I mean you can go invest

in Microsoft and Google I do that just for disclaimer but like that's it and the gains you're gonna get from that are very limited and it's not completely investing in AI you're investing in the entire business model of whatever Google does whatever make stuff does so like in the next year or two to make financial success other than building your own business but if you're not an entrepreneur like ai's probably not going to do that for you right but if you understand web 3 you understand tokens right now and you can start to allocate your capital in this space or start building in this space than that next hype cycle you're setting yourself up for extreme success potentially so yeah what do you think now is the best time to be learning this stuff as well and what that makes me think of is we

talk about how there is different steps to having a web 3 plan right and Kyle and I've been talking about this a lot off the air and what is the steps to having your web3 plan and well step one is to participate and learn and the best way that you learn and understand what is blockchain and what is web3 is you participate the first step is not to go release an nft in your business that's not the first step right so if the objective is to learn then yeah I think go participate which will likely lead you to the Second Step which is to allocate capital usually the first type of allocating capital is not allocating time it's allocating a little bit of investment

money right and getting in the game and investing and so I agree with that beyond that I think that your allocation of business time should go to AI right now so I think that the focus should be on participate in blockchain be there but I don't find myself talking to when I talk to a business leader or when I talk to a founder or an entrepreneur or even just somebody who's looking to change their careers and get into web3 I don't find myself saying to them like oh yeah yeah here's the playbook for how you should use blockchain in your industry because that playbook's still being written and not only that the ux is so [ __ ] that I hesitate to put their

consumers and their users through that right so what I find myself saying more now is focus on AI and how AI can help your business and invest in blockchain and be there and be part of it it and buy some nfts and try some token gating and use it but don't roll it out to your business yet or to your users yet unless you are very confident in the use case of it that it's going to be an enjoyable experience because I just think you have a risk of creating a difficult experience for your consumer well roll it out if it makes your business better if it makes sense right this is the thing you like you use web3 for proper use cases like for example if you have a newsletter or a podcast and you want to have your subscribers in a community the

only way to do that effectively is through web3 right the only way to make your fans your subscribers your customers interoperable amongst different platforms is using web 3 and it's easy to understand that if you just do that then okay that makes sense now should you go and turn your entire business into a web free business no but you use it as tools if it makes your business better if it gives more value to your customers then do it if it doesn't don't just do things because it's web 3 or because it's built on a blockchain right that way was the hype of 2017 everyone's just like I'm gonna launch a token don't do that that doesn't make any sense but for example we launched an nft a pro pass that allows people to get discounts on things allows people to get access into our

private Discord channels we couldn't do that any other way that's only possible as a result of using nfts right in that sense it made complete sense to launch that for our customers right because we just couldn't do it any other way so of course we should do that way so again it just depends on what your business is what the use case is yeah at the moment I think obviously AI is very very important we did a poll on Twitter over the weekend where we asked is AI part of web3 57 said no in one of our friends communities jump which is a community of a few thousand leading marketers and brand leaders at more the Enterprise level they did the same poll 80 said no so I see these polls and I just feel

like I want to like Shake everybody and be like whoa whoa whoa like you're missing something if you think that AI is not part of web3 now maybe that's because all of these people came in for blockchain and so they are still uh holding on to web3 must include blockchain we're not saying that it's not going to include blockchain but it's certainly includes AI because here's the way I see it playing out so I see the side you said Kai that we need ownership online we need ownership we need trust we need Trust online but I also see this other side using Ai and using llms where we will be able to our leading interface with the internet will no longer be Google why would you go to

Google to search or ask a question when you can go to an llm and that becomes the first step that we all here's here's the best way to frame this forget about the terms web3 forget about all this stuff and just think about this if you are an internet user if you don't use AI you're not going to be a good internet user simple as that doesn't matter if it's part of web 3 or web 2 or whatever the hell does not matter if you want to be a good internet user understand blockchain and use AI simple as that right because you need to understand how to own this stuff and where the space is going and you need to understand how to build and create and whatever and both these tools are going to do that for you so like if you want

to get good at the internet [ __ ] the term it doesn't matter what term it is these are two technologies that you're going to need to understand in the coming months to years it's as simple as that is AI part of web3 I don't know I don't really care I just know that I have to use it because everyone else is and if I don't use it they're going to beat me so it's as simple as that if I want to grow my Capital crypto and web 3 is the best way to do that by a long shot it is so much faster than using any traditional asset like gold or whatever [ __ ] all that stuff too so it's like okay I want to grow my finances I want to be a good internet user I got to learn and understand these two things

it's to me that's it I don't care about the semantics well said plus learn metaverse experiences is because that's the other thing that's coming too but we're not really in that one yet go read Matthew Ball's book just go read that book if you wanted he points out how much Hardware has to advance in order to allow us to do the things that we want to do in the metaverse I mean even other side did their recent test two and they had 7 000 people concurrently in the metaverse whereas in test one six months ago they had five thousand that's how slow that Tech is moving right right it's not advancing at the rate that it needs to be in order to have a hundred thousand people all in the same world at the same time now that said

understanding things like Roblox and how kids are using this stuff and Gamers using this stuff is very important to understanding the way the internet is going because I think everything sort of moves into that world now like you said we're far away from all of us just like living in a metaverse kind of thing but hey we already have hundreds of millions of people that are in it and using it every single day so like I think it is important to grasp that concept because that helps you see where the internet is going right look at what the kids are doing right now that's where we're all going to be that's where business will be that's where work will be that's where like humans hang out eventually as well so like you can already start to like get a glimpse of it but I think

that technology is definitely lagging compared to the rest I think we should wrap up soon because we're just going to go on tangents but the other sort of tangent I need to bring up is Hardware too more specifically mobile Hardware I believe that we are going to see massive advancements in Mobile Hardware over the next five years that is going to allow both Ai and blockchain to become a much bigger part of our life and the metaverse actually all three and more specifically on the blockchain side I believe that wallets are going to be integrated into our phones and we're going to have a much easier time interacting with blockchain and Seed phrases aren't going to be a thing anymore it's just going to be so much easier on the AI side I believe that there is going to be some company that

is going to enable you to have a llm native to your phone so that you can come on your phone and you can start using an llm and not worry about privacy and not worry about security because right now one of the big issues is if you use these things the AI now has your data right whereas if I use my phone to take a photo that photo is secured and safe with me it's not like anybody can access that well I think the same thing is going to happen your photos no your photos on iCloud guaranteed which means Apple has access to that too yeah you don't trust apples in the world no not just any of these these companies but like we all do it anyway so I don't see why it's like anyway but here's the thing in terms of Hardware how fast does

AI speed that development right you read magic balls but how long that's going to take well now if every human is 100x more efficient because of AI does that now get sped up significantly exponentially probably so maybe it's not so far off I don't know we all know something that the world doesn't know if you're listening to this know that feel that you're ahead of the curve you are on the frontier and you're positioning yourself well be adaptable there's a lot coming up and there's going to be a lot more coming down the pipeline and that's why you listen to us at Webster Academy just own Ethan use chat GPT and your life will change that's great one more thing that will keep you ahead of the curve and keep you

on top of everything is taking the time to look on chain we like to sit here with the academy eyes on chain and one thing that we're really excited about is this Thursday we've got a guest writer coming in and writing an on-chain report for web3 Academy Pro and this report is a bit different than our typical report because typically we do an on-chain report around a business or a project or a blockchain but in this case Mark Helfman who's the writer and creator of crypto is easy a leading crypto newsletter is doing an analysis of markets on chain and this is a New Concept that we are quite frankly super

excited about so make sure you're subscribed to one three Academy Pro before this Thursday so you can get that report and be confident in your Investments the idea of this is you can use on chain to understand what's happening with the tokens right with the coins so you can see are they going to exchanges which might mean that people are going to sell them into Fiat you can see our coins moving away from exchanges which means that people might be holding on to them are more coins staying in stable coins or going into markets like Bitcoin and eth you can see our long-term holders accumulating more tokens which might be a very bullish time right like if long-term holders are buying this this could be a good thing if it's mainly short-term holders that are buying right now or new people it might mean okay we're in a hype cycle

maybe it's certain time to lower your Investments right it's like you can start to really understand lot by looking on chain in terms of markets which you can't do in the traditional world really really exciting and Denmark does an amazing job explaining it all so he's going to do a nice Deep dive for us giddy up I'm excited thanks everybody for listening in have yourself a great week we got a couple great episodes coming up this week so make sure you check out web3 Academy Pro or sorry web3 Academy podcast producing so much content so it's up to keep on track of it all there's some great stuff coming out Alex from wearable interview with him and then the roll up on Friday we'll chat to you then guys thanks for listening in everybody thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and

if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one