Eric Voorhees, the founder of Venice AI, and his CEO, Otina Baker Taylor, recently appeared on my favorite podcast, Unchained, to talk about the inevitable intersection of crypto and AI, only not how you think. You have got to listen to this.
All it meant that like a year ago when I first started hearing about like, you know, crypto AI stuff, I was like, okay, I don’t get it. What does that mean? And there are definitely a lot of projects which like basically don’t go much deeper than that, those two buzzwords combined. And then they like sell a token and raise a bunch of money and there’s like nothing under the hood.
Yeah, most of the projects that are tying crypto and AI together right now have nothing to do with blockchain, aside from using a crypto token attached to the hype narrative of AI to raise more money for our company, that’s basically selling you a specific use case of ChatGPT. But listen to the lightbulb moment that he had.
So I started understanding it from the perspective of inference needing to be decentralized. If you’re asking your questions to an OpenAI and getting a centralized answer back, than it is going to be curated to whatever that central company.
Wants. So basically right now when you query GPT and you ask it to tell you a dirty joke, it gives you an answer like, oh, I don’t think that would be very appropriate. And that is not a reflection of what the AI thinks. It is a reflection of the person who trained it. And if we are going to have serious inquiry in pursuit of the truth, his argument is we absolutely need an AI that will give us unfiltered answers. Keep listening to how crypto helps.
The only way to have permissionless answers come back is with a decentralized network, and that has to be crypto. You can’t build decentralized economic models without crypto.
And when he says crypto, he’s not necessarily talking about the money. Crypto is gonna be so much more than money, the way your smartphone does so much more than phone calls. And the CEO, Tina, she elaborates on this. Check it out.
I think we’re gonna start to see more of these use cases come to the forefront where you need a token, essentially, to be able to move either information or value around. So I think that’s kind of where some of that convergence is gonna be. And I don’t necessarily mean like a token from, you know, a number go up perspective, but something that is digitally native that can secure either information or value and move it from one place to another. And what.
You need to understand here is that tokens are like a medium, like language or painting. There are a novel way to give a tangible form to intangible things and can be used to make meaning about things like value or things like identity and will help humans align their values and coordinated scale. Now there’s one more final point that Voorhees raises that I hadn’t considered. Check. This is the nail in the coffin for the argument why AI absolutely needs crypto and this time specifically cryptocurrency.
I think there’s this big blind spot that like a lot of the AI people have, which is that as soon as you want AI agents in particular to start doing economic transactions, which is of course, an inevitable requirement, is that agents start to be able to interact economically with each other or with humans. They can only use cryptocurrencies, right? Like an AI agent can’t go set up a bank account or I would love to see a try. It’s hard for a human to do that. And they have a corporeal form and AI can only use digitally native rails for payments. And that, but that means it has to be cryptocurrencies. There’s no future world where like AIs are running around paying each other in fiat. The they’re like incompatible concepts. As crypto develops, as AI develops, these things I think will converge and it’ll become very obvious to you. I think even the AI people in the near future that for economic interaction, like the only way is to use actually digitally native assets.
Now a lot of people might be confusing to hear that because most of our money now is digital. When he says fiat currency, he just means government backed currency that is enforced by the government’s promise to pay. The reason that those AIs can’t use it is because of all the terms and conditions, the censorability of that kind of currency, especially in its digital form. Like he said, when you wanna get a bank account, you gotta share your driver’s license, you gotta do all this stuff. And even then, they still have all these terms and conditions about how you can use your money the same way that we need a decentralized AI. That is not ownable or censorable by a private central entity, we need that AI to be able to use a form of currency that is global, that is permissionless, that is owned collectively by the users and at once by no one person, especially if what we wanna enable is like freedom to transact, freedom to think. You know, if you want GPT to be able to go and spend money for you, then you’re gonna need that kind of currency. Let me know what you think about this. If you agree, if you disagree, be sure to check out Venice AI and then catch the rest of the episode by searching Unshane with Laura Shin on your favorite podcast platform. And hey, unchain, I know you’re on TikTok. So Laura, if you wanna do some crossover action, get at me. Be sure to share this with your friends who are curious or concerned about crypto and AI. Tag him in the comments and let’s keep the discussion going.