6/25/24
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
Midjourney prompt: a crypto bro being attacked by a robot, greek mural on pottery --ar 3:2
I was at Edge Esmeralda for much of June 2024, and met a number of seemingly reasonable people exploring the nexus of crypto and AI. I am very bullish on generative AI. I am very bullish on Crypto. I am very very bearish on AI X Crypto. A lot of projects have been popping up over the last few years, and I think they all largely range from exploitative to misguided - I think the most cynical interpretation for why money and activity is flowing into the sector is that (1) the narrative of stapling the last 2 supercycles in tech together seems superficially smart, and (2) there’s a lot of capital specifically raised for crypto that now wants exposure to AI. The customer for a lot of these projects is the investor, not so much the developer or the consumer.
That said, I wanted to be (relatively) open-minded with my evaluation of the space, so I wanted to break down the major types of projects I’m seeing and what about them gives me bad vibes. If I am wrong hopefully it will be because of a type I didn’t identify, or they created value in a way I wasn’t seeing.
I think of technology as being a scalar multiplier to some human objective. We largely provide the direction of interest, and shoes → bicycles → motors → steam engines all give us the ability to move in that direction easier/faster/cheaper/etc. AI and Crypto are both such technologies, and can be applied towards any number of directional domains - biology, media, finance, etc. It’s not clear to me that technology can be slapped on technology productively - a scalar multiplied by a scalar is not a vector. A telescope on top of a microwave isn’t really useful for most use cases. Maybe there are some niche use cases where that may be a valuable tool, but if we look through the commonly cited use cases for AI x Crypto I am skeptical about all of them.