The best money for AI is cryptocurrency – Cointelegraph Magazine

For every true blockchain project that leverages artificial intelligence to create a better world, like Dr. Ben Goertzel’s Singularity.net, there are 100 coins like AI Doge, which combines the hyperbolic terms “AI” and “Crypto.” Plog token.

“It’s just a basic buzzword,” explains Near blockchain founder Illia Polosukhin, who worked on the groundbreaking “Attention Is All You Need” research that led to large-scale language models like ChatGPT and Claude.

Polosukhin, one of the few people in the world who is well-versed not only in cryptocurrencies but also in AI, says that if you ignore the hype, the technology really suits you.

“There are a lot of specific things about AI and Web3 that can use or benefit each other,” he says.

Magazine spoke with Polosukhin, Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen, Quantstamp’s Richard Ma, Casper’s Ralf Kubli and others to explore real-life, not overhyped, use cases for AI in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.

Over the next week, we will be showcasing one real-world use case of AI in cryptocurrency every day. This includes why you shouldn’t believe the hype.

The best money for AI is cryptocurrency

Everyone from Circle boss Jeremy Allaire to former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes to Animoca Brand’s Yat Siu are confident that cryptocurrencies will become the currency of choice for AI agents.

After all, LLMs do not have access to bank accounts, but they allow for easy payments using funded cryptocurrency wallets and are well-suited to interacting with the logic of smart contracts and DeFi protocols.

Anyone delegating the funds in the wallet can set overarching strategies and rules, and the AI ​​agent can observe how they performed using the blockchain’s transparent records.

Allaire says AI and blockchain are “made for each other,” with technologies suited to “machine-generated and enforced contracts” and “machine-to-machine exchange of value.”

I completely agree. AI and blockchain are made for each other. Where data comes from, contracts created and enforced by machines, and machine-to-machine value exchange. We are already hearing about AI Bots running on-chain wallets and using USDC. https://t.co/BwmdGdVufJ

— Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) May 25, 2023

Hayes said Bitcoin is the most logical payment system for AI because it is “always available, digital, and fully automated,” allowing AI to pay for “data and computing power” to “survive.” I believe it.

That said, Hayes also seems to think that AI will live for trillions of years, “until the heat death of the universe.” Therefore, LLM will choose Bitcoin, which robots can mine. So sometimes Hayes’s ideas tend to stray away from him.

Yat Siu, Chairman and Founder of Animoca Brands, is another prominent industry figure who believes that cryptocurrencies are the only logical way for AIs to transact “with each other as autonomous beings in the future.”

“In the future, 70-80% of transactions will be conducted through autonomous AI agents, making the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies a perfect match.”

But do not take the word of a petty human being. ChatGPT also chooses cryptocurrency as its preferred currency without any hindrance in that direction.

Trading bots that can buy and sell cryptocurrencies already account for up to 80% of spot trading volume, and these traditional automated bots are likely to be gradually replaced by more intelligent AI agents. (However, LLM-based trading experiments like Autopilot’s GPT Portfolio have seen mixed results so far, so putting your funds under AI’s control will be a risky proposition for some time.)

Near DAO members have launched an experiment that will allow AI to determine whether certain new projects meet relevant grant criteria to be autonomously funded by the Treasury.

How to add Bitcoin and cryptocurrency payments to your AI agent

Integrating cryptocurrency payments with AI is certainly easy. Lightning Labs has released a set of developer tools that enable GPT-4 to buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin using Layer 2 networks. And AI startup Fewsats has already created an agent that can pay Lightning Network invoices.

I don’t want you to be surprised, but my @OpenAI The agent just paid my LN bill.

For the first time #ChatGPT payment #Bitcoin ? pic.twitter.com/811JdtJ3iB

– Few (@fewsats) November 14, 2023

Fetch.Ai also offers a service that allows you to create an AI agent that can make payments on your behalf.

Syndicate.io founder Ian Dao Lee recently wrote a blog detailing how he was able to create a GPT in just a few hours using OpenAi’s API and Syndicate’s Transaction Cloud. This cloud can automatically make USDC payments from Base’s secure wallet. network.

He’s excited about the possibilities this could have. “The ability of AI to pay for things, hold things of value, exchange things of value, and create things of value on behalf of itself or others is how AI gains true agency,” he says.

“Some of the most interesting ideas open up not only when AI agents can transact on behalf of people, businesses, or other AI agents, but also when AI agents can manage items of value and transact on their own behalf.”

Lee believes that in the future, AI agents will be able to autonomously shop for items, manage the finances of people and organizations, decide and communicate funding approvals, or seek to increase their wealth to help others.

However, it turns out that AIs are just as stingy with money as humans, donating $3 to charity.

Don’t believe the hype

AI may now make cryptocurrencies easier to use, but banks are eager to adopt AI for a variety of purposes and are already using it extensively to detect financial fraud.

Payments companies like Brex are working on integrating AI with corporate bank accounts so that AI agents can automatically make payments in defined situations, such as travel expenses.

And one research team recently published a preprint describing how they successfully trained an AI agent called MM-Navigator to search for and purchase specific products through Amazon within a specific budget.

Until cryptocurrency payments become more widely accepted, fiat still has many advantages when dealing with businesses in the real world.

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Andrew Fenton

Andrew Fenton, based in Melbourne, is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, a film journalist for SA Weekend and The Melbourne Weekly.

Follow the author @andrewfenton