Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Cryptohunt is dead.
There, we said it. We promised you some big news throughout the week and this is it.
But here’s the deal: Bad news, it is not. At all.
Cryptohunt has evolved and we are excited to share our new name with you:
Learn.xyz
We will reveal more in the coming weeks, but you can already point your browser to it and try it out.
But why the change? Well, most of you have told us that they like all the new content: AI, quantum computing, or how to use Discord. But as a small team, we have a hard time covering it all. Or we should say “had” - because we have a new team mate.
Her name is LUMI.
Lumi is not what you think. Lumi is an artificial intelligence, and dare we say, much smarter than us. Type anything into learn.xyz and Lumi will create the a fun learning course for you.
Want to know why Bitcoin is doomed? Why bananas are bent? What the future of space travel is? Any topic, any language, Lumi got you.
It’s quite magical, so play around with it. And as far as this podcast is concerned, we are taking a break for the rest of the week to figure out what is the best format going forward.
But if you think you’ll miss this, email podcast@learn.xyz with two simple words: Miss you.
This podcast was produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3. Thank you all, thank you more than 55k listeners. I myself learned something new for every one of the 373 episodes until hear.
Copywriting of all but 2 episodes was done by the phenomenal Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, design is done by Carmen Rincon, and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and now learn.xyz and I was your host of this daily show. We ill be back.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
A new, and as is typical, unpronounceable technology is in crypto town. It is called ERC-4337. But despite the awkward name, this one is paradoxically meant to improve your life a ton.
The problem it tackles? That it is currently way too easy to lose your crypto forever.
As things are today, every crypto wallet on all the major blockchains is protected by a secret key only you have. This key is so complicated that you can’t possibly remember it - and not surprisingly this leads to many people losing it. Ever heard of those people who lost millions in Bitcoin? They didn’t lose the money, they lost their keys. The result? The same.
ERC-4337 puts an end to this by allowing other means of accessing wallets - for example by assigning people you trust as those who can trigger a recovery. Another option is to have multiple owners of a wallet, so there is always someone who has access.
And as bad as that name is, this could be a major step towards making crypto go mainstream because handling those keys is such a bad experience with such potentially dire consequences.
Might we just suggest a better name so the world will understand? How about “recoverable wallet”? As always, you’ll be the judge!
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, design is done by Carmen Rincon, and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Today, the main event of one of crypto’s largest conferences is kicking off. We are, of course, talking about Eth Denver.
So what is it and why all the fuzz?
EthDenver, as the name gives away, is an event that originally focused on the Ethereum blockchain, and – you probably didn’t see that one coming – happens every year in Denver.
But it’s unlike traditional conferences or conventions that tend to just be in one building complex. Instead, the events of Eth Denver are spread all over town, and organized not by a single team, but anyone who wants to participate.
In a way, that captures the spirit of decentralization that many blockchains try to achieve on a technical level. But it also allows for a really diverse event: Anything from tech talks to meeting investors is part of people’s agenda. To stay entertained and relaxed, there are DJ chill lounges, food trucks, and even a child care center.
And it is thanks to this wide range of things happening organically, and all over the literal map, that Eth Denver has become much more than just about Ethereum. Many other blockchains and their fans attend and enjoy spirited exchanges – definitely something the crypto space could use more of if you ask us.
It is an event true blockchain enthusiasts don’t usually miss out on. We are saying usually, because we are also going through a crypto winter, and it remains to be seen just how many enthusiasts are still flocking to Denver. But however many there end up being: expect it to be a great event. And of course, we also have boots on the ground. If you want to say hi, email us at podcast@cryptohunt.it.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
If you’ve been surfing the internet at all these days, you’ll come across a new trend: Companies using .xyz as their domain endings. But what’s up with that?
Traditionally, you would expect a website to use a .com – after all, that’s where the first wave of internet companies was born… hence the name dot-com-boom. And this one is no different.
But dot-XYZ has turned into the new wave of dot-coms, ever since it was launched in 2014. It all started with crypto companies eyeing the new ending because they could still find easily memorable website names there. But what was once just for rebels, misfits, and innovators, has since turned so cool that it attracts the mainstream: Jack Dorsey’s Block, which is the parent company of payments giant Square, uses it now, for example. Google parent Alphabet resides at ABC.xyz too.
But, popularity among all sizes of businesses aside – what do people associate with .xyz, in a world where .com stands for established internet businesses?
Many think of a new wave of innovating tech companies - the new kids on the block, ready to disrupt tomorrow, those building on new technologies like Web3 and artificial intelligence. And simply those companies who want to show they are not the establishment.
It sure is hip to be square again. We are in exciting times, and it feels like a new wave of transformative technologies is coming our way. And keep an eye out for big news from us as well: Like we promised last week, we’ll reveal a secret we’ve been working on for the last few months.
And it is not to late to tell a friend about this podcast, so that they hear about this secret, too. Tanks so much for spreading the word for us! My name is Christian Byza, and I am the host of this daily show.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
It’s that time again. Here’s yet another new, complicated word for crypto enthusiasts to throw at you: Ordinals. Bitcoin Ordinals to be precise.
And if you don’t know what’s going on, we think you should: Because they’ve been pushing Bitcoin’s price back up quite a bit.
To understand ordinals, we’ll have to make a quick trip down the memory lane of this podcast and look at NFTs, non-fungible tokens. In a nutshell, they are the blockchain version of a digital collectible, like a baseball card, but in the cloud. And because each NFT unique, they are non-fungible, or not interchangeable.
Ok. Back to ordinals. They are a way to achieve the same with Bitcoin. The reason it has taken years longer than on other blockchains to achieve this, is that Bitcoin can’t do anything other than move Bitcoin money around. In the words of the crypto crowd: it only supports fungible tokens - meaning that each is exchangeable for the other. Think of dollar bill and another one - completely exchangeable. Same with two Bitcoins.
The trick here is that the digital collectible is saved in the transaction memo of a Bitcoins transaction itself. Originally, the intent was to put the purpose of the transaction there - like “this Bitcoin is for the pizza you paid for”. The interesting thing here is that ordinals can even save the entire collectible itself, for example a photo, which makes them more powerful than the king of NFTs, Ethereum.
But the usual downsides are still there: You can only have a limited amount of Bitcoin transactions to carry those ordinals, and when you spend the money your ordinal is tied to by accident, they are gone. And don’t get us started on the environmental impact on Bitcoin – it’s not great.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Last week, crypto exchange giant Coinbase announced that they are launching BASE, which is their own blockchain. So what is BASE, and why did Coinbase think it was necessary to create yet another blockchain?
Let’s dig in.
BASE is what is commonly referred to as a Layer 2, or L2 blockchain. This simply means that it exists on top of an established blockchain, Ethereum in this case. These L2 chains are complicated solutions for an unfortunate problem: Ethereum is way too slow and expensive to be considered usable in most cases.
The way this works is a bit like elevators. Think of Ethereum as an elevator that stops at every level of a skyscraper. At the end, you are certain you didn't skip a floor because you saw that door open and close many times, but it takes a long time to get all the way to the top. Level 2 chains skip a bunch of floors instead, taking you up more quickly. The tradeoff is that you can't really verify how far you actually went until you look out of the window.
But what Coinbase is doing here is nothing new. People have been trying to mitigate Ethereum's problems for a long time now, for example, the popular Polygon blockchain. So why is Coinbase seemingly reinventing the wheel here?
We suspect this is about having a shot at directing where the industry will go. Coinbase has been under a lot of pressure lately. Most of its customers are using Coinbases' accounts to store their crypto - which means it could be gone in case of bankruptcy or hacks. Coinbase likes it this way, but sees the writing on the wall - as everyone is moving their money into wallets they control themselves, Coinbase needs another way to stay relevant. And what's more relevant than building the highway people drive on?
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3. We are back here tomorrow.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Have you ever watched Jim Carrey imitate another star’s voice and were amazed by it? Then get ready to be wowed by a revolution in synthetic voices created by artificial intelligence.
It used to be that voices are somewhat of a person’s fingerprint: You will always recognize your parents speaking, even over the worst phone connection.
But things are changing big time: AI can now imitate anyone’s voice almost instantly. And the applications are endless - you could listen to your favorite podcast in the voice of Barbara Streisand, George Clooney’s voice could be used in every language his movies are released in, and maybe - but just maybe - Siri might finally be able to hold a decent conversation while sounding like you.
At the heart of it is a process called machine learning. It analyses voice samples from real people, figures out what makes them unique, and builds a profile that can be applied to any voice or read any text. This is something that only recent evolutions in computer processing power enabled.
You know, we may even try it out for this podcast, just to see if you can tell the difference. Because if it gets this voice and pronunciation right - then anything is possible!
And that concludes our week on all the amazing things AI can do and will change. Let us know how you like these mini series… And next time we’ll talk about a secret project we’ve been working on.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman and design is done by Carmen Rincon. And the voice in between was generated by AI. Happy weekend!
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Today, we’ll touch on another area that generative AI will change entirely: How we experience stories in books, video games, and even TV shows. But before we dive in: If you are new here, make sure to start a few episodes back in 363 where this mini-series begins.
You’ve done it hundreds of times: Start a book, read it all the way through, and finally close it after the last page. Or you’ve played a video game and eventually reached every possible corner of its world.
That’s because stories eventually end. They are written by humans, and those humans move on to the next thing. Even Game of Thrones eventually ended.
With AI, things are entirely different. By its very definition, “generative” AI can generate content instantly, taking into account the context you provide.
So how could this look like? Let’s say you love the Sherlock Holmes books - if AI were to write them, you could get a new one basically whenever you wanted. Or you play a game, and AI creates the world and storyline automatically - meaning you could play forever. Even for TV this is possible: Really like Breaking Bad and never want it to end? Well, AI is here to help.
And while some - us included - prefer change and don’t think things ending is a bad thing, we bet many folks out there will love this new world… So much so, that you’ll begrudgingly have to be part of it. What do you think about all this?
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
The future is almost here, and it could mean big changes for how we create music, too.
If you’ve heard anything about AI, it’s probably related to its ability to create text, for example as a chatbot. But did you know that there are AIs that can express themselves in other ways, such as creating music?
One of them is called MusicML and was developed by Google. You can simply describe to it in words what you’d want it to compose, and it’ll spits out its version of that.
This is quite amazing on a conceptual level if you think about it - you don’t have to be able to play an instrument, you don’t even need to understand music theory. And yet, you can become a musician.
Do you find that thought upsetting? Do you think it should be harder to create something, or else all things we create lack value?
Maybe so - which is a general debate we should all have, because like it or not: AI is coming in hot. But we think there is something heartwarming about allowing anyone to create beauty - especially if it’s music.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Yesterday, we talked about AI and how it will most likely allow for completely personalized movie and TV content that is incredibly realistic, but generated just for you. And honestly, looking at the stuff we see in our Netflix account right now, that future can’t come fast enough if you ask us.
But for today, on to something that you can already experience yourself: The replacement of search engines like Google.
To understand the incredible shift we are about to witness there, let’s first look at why Google exists. There are billions of websites out there, and each has some sort of information to offer. You would never be able to find it, so Google reads all of them for you, and with just one search, shows just the few that are most relevant.
And this is where the trouble starts. Now it’s on you to click link after link in the search results, doing your own work to figure out the solution to your question.
With AI, on the other hand, technology can now do the reading and summarizing for you. Say you are looking for a new toaster. You type in “best toasters” and it’ll start having a quick conversation with you: How many slices do you want to toast? How much do you want to spend?
And then the magic happens: It’ll create a completely personalized recommendation. No further research needed.
And if you think this won’t work, or only work with specific types of questions like the toaster purchase - well, we challenge you to try the new Bing which will come out any day now. Microsoft has built exactly AI to replace search and it is incredible how well it responds to you.
As always - you’ll be the judge. But we think this is Google 2.0 - the question is just: Will Google miss the boat?
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
This week, we have a special mini series for you - how our future will likely look like, thanks to AI.
Today: What you watch on TV will change big time.
You may have stumbled across videos of a fake Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton on TikTok. Or you don’t remember, because you thought they were real. That’s how far we’ve come already: we can simply generate fake celebrities and you wouldn’t know it.
But what applies to celebrities also applies to the rest of film production: Why rent a studio, when it can all be done with AI in a computer?
This just makes sense, because it makes things easier. But also think of it from Tom Cruise’s perspective: Why only do a movie or two a year if he can sell his face for 100 movies, never show up, and rake in the cash anyhow?
But the real twist will be that AI can now generate entire stories, based on personal preferences. ChatGPT can already write movie scripts, and plugging those into another AI to make the actual movie is not a hard-to-imagine next step.
So, when you watch something ten years from now, it could be tailor made for you; a plot the way you like it, with your favorite stars; just for you.
Crazy right?
But what’s even crazier is that we are almost there.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3. And if you like this or other episodes - please do us a favor and recommend us in your next lunch break with a friend! Thanks so much.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
It’s been pretty quiet around FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, hasn’t it? But don’t let the silence fool you: The real work is just getting started behind the scenes. So let’s catch you up on where things are because it’s still quite a while until Bankman-Fried’s trial starts on October 2nd this year.
Right now, FTX lawyers are incredibly busy behind the scenes recovering as much money as they can. What separates a great bankruptcy team from a bad one is basically just one skill: How much money they are able to claw back to give to those that the bankrupt company owes.
With FTX, they have their work cut out for them. You may remember that SBF was once called crypto’s white knight because he bailed failing crypto companies out with billions in investments.
One of the more interesting cases is that of Modulo capital, a tiny hedge fund that somehow got a $400 million investment from SBF.
Now, you are probably asking yourself: If SBF invested that money long before he got into trouble, doesn’t it belong to the hedge fund then, fair and square?
Yes, in theory, but things are complicated. The fact that Modulo is negotiating the return of the money probably means that they suspect that Bankman-Fried got it illegally in the first place. And instead of ending up entangled in endless legal fights with all the people who got hurt by FTX, the Modulo team probably decided to give it back in return for a legal agreement that FTX’s new bankruptcy management won’t come after them.
And if you think $400 million is a good chunk of money, hold your breath – word on the street is that the bankruptcy lawyers are trying to recover over $4bn, which is a crazy 10 times that. You can see, a lot is indeed going on behind the scenes. We’ll keep you updated.
I hear you back here next Monday. 5 times a week, like every week!
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, design is done by Carmen Rincon, and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Say you are the president of a country that has struggled to keep its own currency stable. Your people are suffering from hyperinflation, businesses are dying, and naturally, you are not winning any popularity contests right now.
But you also notice something: Many citizens have started using the US Dollar as an alternative currency on the street. They like it because its value is stable and they’ve started to accept it universally. The only problem: There are only so many dollar bills you can import – and certainly not enough of them to support your entire country.
But this gives you a clever idea: What if you just made a stablecoin, such as Tether or USDC, the official currency of your country, you’d have all the benefits and none of the drawbacks, right?
Well - let’s look into that!
Your first problem: You’d have to find a place that has that many stablecoins available for sale. There are only about $70bn Dollars worth of Tether, the largest stablecoin, in circulation for example. Sounds like a lot, but is not really if we are talking about an entire economy. The reason for that is quite simple: In order to buy them, you have to trade an equivalent amount of something else for them.
But in theory that could be solved. You’ll work closely with the Tether company, and over time convert your own volatile currency into Tether.
But now you have a second problem on your hands, and this is a big one. For a quick second, think about where the stability of the US Dollar comes from: It comes from the US economy. But the US economy has a fixed size, and the more outside economies cling onto the US Dollar, the more these countries introduce their own economic instabilities - like the ones in your imaginary country - into the actual US Dollar.
And that is a problem we can’t overcome and is also why stablecoins will never be able to replace an entire country’s currency. It’s a nice idea but fails pretty quickly in practice.
If you enjoy episodes like this one - why don’t you refer a friend to it. It would mean the world to us.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3. My name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and your host of this daily show.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
New York officials just told a crypto company to stop listing one of the largest stablecoins, Binance’s BUSD. And to make things even more interesting, the Securities and Exchange Commission is planning to sue the same company for violating securities laws.
That’s a lot to unpack, so let’s start from the beginning.
This crypto company, called Paxos, is letting its users buy BUSD on their platform. BUSD is a stablecoin, which means that 1 BUSD tries to be almost exactly 1 US Dollar at any given time.
So far, this seems like a really solid idea – so why would governments object to this?
It helps to understand that their actions are well-intended: They are trying to protect average consumers from falling into investment traps or taking risks they don’t fully understand. The fact that they are starting with stablecoins is no coincidence: Those are not as stable as the name may suggest. \
We’ve covered all the problems in past episodes, but in summary, there are two main concerns: Either the issuer of the stablecoin does not have the money to back it all up – as may be the case with Tether, and even BUSD – or the technology may not be able to handle a run on the bank, which brought down TerraUSD for example.
And now the government is starting to wake up, and its attacking the weakest link in the chain: The companies that let people buy and sell those stablecoins. Because the stablecoins themselves live on blockchains, which are by their very nature basically impossible to shut down.
And if you’ve always wondered: If a stablecoin is following a currency like the US Dollar closely, could the entire world move to the US Dollar thanks to them? Stay tuned for tomorrow, where we’ll talk about that.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3. And if you do not want to miss tomorrow’s episode - subscribe now - wherever you listen to your podcast. I hear you back here at 11am CET or 2am PST.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Coinbase recently launched a new tool that helps customers recover funds - so-called ERC-20 tokens that have been lost in transfer.
But how could something go lost in transfer in the first place? Well, let’s imagine your good old leather wallet for a second. You are at home, put in a few dollars, go to the supermarket, and use them. No problem.
But now let’s imagine you also have a few Euros from your last trip. You put them in a separate compartment of your wallet because that’s just the place where any money goes. But because they are Euros, you can’t use them at the local supermarket. So eventually you just forget and that’s the end of that.
In crypto, things are a bit like that. You can send money, which crypto people call tokens, to a crypto wallet. But when those tokens are not officially supported by your wallet, you can’t use them, and in many cases, they won’t even show up. They are there though, just tugged away invisibly.
That’s an inconvenience. The real problem is this: When you don’t actually own the wallet, but your exchange, such as Coinbase does, you can’t send it back. It’s stuck because they don't support moving that kind of token around.
That's pretty annoying, and people make this mistake a lot. So often, in fact, that Coinbase created that tool we mentioned. It can reverse those transactions so you can finally access that unsupported money.
Sounds pretty useful, but don't think for a second that there isn't a catch - Coinbase will charge you a fat 5% of anything you recover over $100. Your misfortune, their business opportunity.
Oh, and more more thing: Of course you can find the link to the Coinbase Asset Recovery tool in the shownotes.
Tool: https://www.coinbase.com/asset-recovery
Help center: https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/sending-or-receiving-cryptocurrency/lost-assets
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Today, back to some hot crypto and finance news: The US government may be banning the practice of staking.
If you don’t remember what it is, we recommend you skip back to episode 27 where we have a simple explanation. But for now, you just need to know the basics - staking is when a crypto holder invests their crypto to help validated transactions. In return, they get paid by those users who transact, effectively turning staking into a form of passive income.
And now - according to Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong – the SEC, a US agency overseeing certain financial markets, might be making staking entirely illegal.
Just to understand how hard of a hit that would be to crypto, let’s look at a similar example. When you put money into a savings account, the bank pays you interest on it. Or if you buy stocks that pay dividends, the company provides that kind of passive income. Staking is effectively the equivalent of those in the crypto world. Or in other words: Making it illegal is like telling you that you can’t generate interest payments from your savings anymore.
But before you get too upset, consider the SEC’s perspective. Ever since crypto emerged, it has been playing catch-up with little to no actual oversight. People have been ripped off or lost money because they didn’t understand the risks. While this move may be a very aggressive one, it underlines that the agency is starting to take its job of consumer protection seriously.
But is it overstepping? Let’s wait and see what actually happens - and until then you can now, as always, make up your own mind.
And before we end today - thanks so much for tuning in every day. It means the world to us.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
We all ask ourselves dozens of questions everyday: “How do I cook the best possible steak?”, “How do I score a free upgrade to a hotel suite?”, or maybe even “Why is this airplane actually flying?”
Whatever it is, your first instinct is probably just to grab your phone and Google it. And then you realize that there are literally millions of articles on each topic and learning the details that matter is a crazy annoyance, even today in 2023.
Well, thanks to AI, we are witnessing a fundamental change you will feel for decades: Artificial intelligence can now ingest the world’s entire information, make connection between all those pages, and distill things the way you want them.
Want a podcast about that steak? At your fingertips, instantly. A nice little fun Duolingo-style set of learning cards about why airplanes fly? You name it, AI can produce it once companies build great products around it.
This is as big a change for the world as the invention of the internet. Think about it - first there was Yahoo, a single page with a few links. Then Google made billions of websites searchable, but you still have to deal with those individual pages. Now, suddenly everything gets served up on whatever silver platter you like.
You can probably tell we are really hyped about this - and we better be, since we are all about learning. But there is more to it and we have something incredibly exciting cooking. But it’ll remain a secret for a few more weeks… Until then, stay tuned here, as we’ll drop hints left and right on this podcast.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.
Copywriting is done by Arndt Voges, Social Media is done by Brett Holleman, design is done by Carmen Rincon, and my name is Christian Byza, Co-Founder of Cryptohunt and I am your host of this daily show.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Google just wiped $100 billion – yes that is billion as in nine zeros – off its market capitalization with a botched AI demo.
If you had any doubt that everyone thinks AI is the future, look no further than today’s demonstration of Google’s new AI chatbot. As you know from yesterday’s podcast episode, the company has been racing to catch up with archrival Microsoft, who owns almost half of the company that makes popular AI ChatGPT.
The problem? It seems like Google doesn’t have it figured out yet. The AI made a factual mistake in a promotional video, which is not only embarrassing because they could have just created a better video, but also shows just how much behind ChatGPT Google must actually be.
And the stock markets didn’t take kindly to it: They fear that Microsoft will eat Google for lunch. The stock price fell a crazy 8% after today’s demo. And those fears are not unfounded - Microsoft is already embedding AI chat into Bing, the search engine you may have almost forgotten about. If people were to stop Googling things, it’d game over the tech legend, because all their money comes from ads, and most of those ads are shown through Google Search.
We live in amazing times. Just a few months ago, people would have seriously wondered how anyone on earth could survive without searching on Google multiple times a day. And now we are already talking about that being a thing of the past. Quite exciting if you ask us, and about time that Google gets some real competition.
We can’t wait to see what will unfold. And Google - we know you feel the pressure, but maybe next time you’ll do things the Apple way and show products when they are done. An extra day or two of video-editing wouldn’t have hurt, especially if it could determine the future of your company.
And for me: I just installed bing on my Google pixel phone and used my skype longin from the early 2000 to get started. How things changed.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3. And if you like stories like this - why don’t you tell a friend or two about us. It would mean the world to us.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Do you enjoy watching a good fight from the comfort of your living room? Then get ready, because old competitors Microsoft and Google have stepped into the Artificial Intelligence ring.
Those two have fought each other plenty of times. Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs: We'd say Google won that by technical knockout, but it took years. Microsoft Phone vs. Android: Well, that's a clear one, making that a 2 to 0 for Google if you are counting.
And the list goes on, and we can now add artificial intelligence to it.
You've certainly heard about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot by a company called OpenAI. What you probably didn't know is that Microsoft struck a deal to eventually own 49% of that company.
This was such a big threat that Google called an internal "code red". You can easily see why: ChatGPT can combine the knowledge of millions of websites into a single human-like answer to any question you may have. That experience beats Googling stuff by a mile.
And not googling would be Google's death. So they didn't wait too long and just announced "Bard", their awkwardly named conversational AI competitor. We haven't seen it in action yet, but apparently, they've been working on it for years. And if anyone has scraped and indexed all the web pages in the universe, it's Google - a big advantage.
And if you want to try the power of AI to learn new things, here's a little secret: We've been working on a prototype you can play around with. Go to cryptohunt.it/magic, type in what you want to learn about, and lean back. It's really a bit like magic.
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3. And if this was the first time that you listened to this podcast: Thanks for joining - hope you like it. Don’t forget to subscribe so you do not miss tomorrows episode. My name is Christian Byza and I am your host of this daily show.
Welcome to the Cryptohunt Jam, where you learn – in just a minute or two a day – what is happening in crypto and other game-changing ideas. As always: In plain English.
Yesterday, we talked about how AI has schools and universities in full panic mode since artificial intelligence has been used to write essays and take exams…in place of the student who’s supposed to be tested on what they’ve learned.
While AI used to do someone’s homework is not a great use of AI…what about a positive use for the groundbreaking technology?
One of our picks: Content moderation.
Rather than having a team of individuals reading through pages of flagged posts, what if a platform installed a stellar AI to analyze the language used in posts?
In theory, this could be an insanely good use of the technology. Why?
AI models, like GPT3, are master analyzers of language. They have to be. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to produce those fantastic responses to the simplest of questions.
If someone is harassing another user with blatant discriminating language…an AI can be geared to remove the post and (if needed) the person who posted it.
Here’s the catch. AI isn’t great at moderating yet. It’s full of unfair biases and mistakes that could get the wrong person kicked off of a social media platform.
We’re not ones to shy away from a civilized, well-reasoned debate, and we’d hate to see someone who is respectfully voicing their opinion get unfairly locked out from a profile.
That said, with more training, you could see fewer of those toxic arguments fill your timeline thanks to the hard work of an AI.
I hear you back here tomorrow. As always at 11am CET, 2am PST. Thanks for listening!
This podcast is produced by Cryptohunt.it, the easiest place to learn all about Web3.