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AI Arena

AI Eye chatted with Framework Venture’s Vance Spencer recently and he raved about the possibilities offered by an upcoming game his fund invested in called AI Arena in which players train AI models how to battle each other in an arena.

Framework Ventures was an early investor in Chainlink and Synthetix and three years ahead of NBA Top Shots with a similar NFL platform, so when they get excited about the future prospects, it’s worth looking into.

Also backed by Paradigm, AI Arena is like a cross between Super Smash Brothers and Axie Infinity. The AI models are tokenized as NFTs, meaning players can train them up and flip them for profit or rent them to noobs. While this is a gamified version, there are endless possibilities involved with crowdsourcing user-trained models for specific purposes and then selling them as tokens in a blockchain-based marketplace.

AI Arena
Screenshot from AI Arena

“Probably some of the most valuable assets on-chain will be tokenized AI models; that’s my theory at least,” Spencer predicts.

AI Arena chief operating officer Wei Xi explains that his cofounders, Brandon Da Silva and Dylan Pereira, had been toying with creating games for years, and when NFTs and later AI came out, Da Silva had the brainwave to put all three elements together. 

“Part of the idea was, well, if we can tokenize an AI model, we can actually build a game around AI,” says Xi, who worked alongside Da Silva in TradFi. “The core loop of the game actually helps to reveal the process of AI research.”

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There are three elements to training a model in AI Arena. The first is demonstrating what needs to be done — like a parent showing a kid how to kick a ball. The second element is calibrating and providing context for the model — telling it when to pass and when to shoot for goal. The final element is seeing how the AI plays and diagnosing where the model needs improvement.   

“So the overall game loop is like iterating, iterating through those three steps, and you’re kind of progressively refining your AI to become this more and more well balanced and well rounded fighter.”

The game uses a custom-built feed forward neural network and the AIs are constrained and lightweight, meaning the winner won’t just be whoever’s able to throw the most computing resources at the model.

“We want to see ingenuity, creativity to be the discerning factor,” Xie says. 

Currently in closed beta testing, AI Arena is targeting the first quarter of next year for mainnet launch on Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum. There are two versions of the game: One is a browser-based game that anyone can log into with a Google or Twitter account and start playing for fun, while the other is blockchain-based for competitive players, the “esports version of the game.”

Also read: Exclusive — 2 years after John McAfee’s death, widow Janice is broke and needs answers

This being crypto, there is a token of course, which will be distributed to players who compete in the launch tournament and later be used to pay entry fees for subsequent competitions. Xie envisages a big future for the tech, saying it can be used “in a first-person shooter game and a soccer game,” and expanded into a crowdsourced marketplace for AI models that are trained for specific business tasks.

“What somebody has to do is frame it into a problem and then we allow the best minds in the AI space to compete on it. It’s just a better model.”

Chatbots can’t be trusted

A new analysis from AI startup Vectara shows that the output from large language models like ChatGPT or Claude simply can’t be relied upon for accuracy.

Everyone knew that already, but until now there was no way to quantify the precise amount of bullshit each model is generating. It turns out that GPT-4 is the most accurate, inventing fake information around just 3% of the time. Meta’s Llama models make up nonsense 5% of the time while Anthropic’s Claude 2 system produced 8% bullshit.

Google’s PaLM hallucinated an astonishing 27% of its answers.

Palm 2 is one of the components incorporated into Google’s Search Generative Experience, which highlights useful snippets of information in response to common search queries. It’s also unreliable.

For months now, if you ask Google for an African country beginning with the letter K, it shows the following snippet of totally wrong information: 

“While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K’. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound.”

It turns out Google’s AI got this from a ChatGPT answer, which in turn traces back to a Reddit post, which was just a gag set up for this response:

“Kenya suck on deez nuts lmaooo.”

Deez nuts
Screenshot from r/teenagers subreddit (Spreekaway Twitter)

Google rolled out the experimental AI feature earlier this year, and recently users started reported it was shrinking and even disappearing from many searches.

Google may have just been refining it though, as this week the feature rolled out to 120 new countries and four new languages, with the ability to ask follow-up questions right on the page. 

AI images in the Israel-Gaza war

While journalists have done their best to hype up the issue, AI-generated images haven’t played a huge role in the war, as the real footage of Hamas atrocities and dead kids in Gaza is affecting enough.

There are examples, though: 67,000 people saw an AI-generated image of a toddler staring at a missile attack with the caption “This is what children in Gaza wake up to.”  Another pic of three dust-covered but grimly determined kids in the rubble of Gaza holding a Palestinian flag was shared by Tunisian journalist Muhammad al-Hachimi al-Hamidi.

And for some reason, a clearly AI-generated pic of an “Israeli refugee camp” with an enormous Star of David on the side of each tent was shared multiple times on Arabic news outlets in Yemen and Dubai.

Israeli refugees
AI-generated pic picked up by news sites (Twitter)

Aussie politics blog Crikey.com reported that Adobe is selling AI-generated images of the war through its stock image service, and an AI pic of a missile strike was run as if it were real by media outlets including Sky and the Daily Star.

But the real impact of AI-generated fakes is providing partisans with a convenient way to discredit real pics. There was a major controversy over a bunch of pics of Hamas’s leadership living it up in luxury, which users claimed were AI fakes. 

But the images date back to 2014 and were just poorly upscaled using AI. AI company Acrete also reports that social media accounts associated with Hamas have regularly claimed that genuine footage and pictures of atrocities are AI-generated to cast doubt on them.

In some good timing, Google has just announced it’s rolling out tools that can help users spot fakes. Click on the three dots on the top right of an image and select “About This Image” to see how old the image is, and where it’s been used. An upcoming feature will include fields showing whether the image is AI generated, with Google AI, Facebook, Microsoft, Nikon and Leica all adding symbols or watermarks to AI imagery.

OpenAI dev conference

ChatGPT this week unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, which is much faster and can accept long text inputs like books of up to 300 pages. The model has been trained on data up to April this year and can generate captions or descriptions of visual input. For devs, the new model will be one-third the cost to access.

OpenAI is also releasing its version of the App Store, called the GPT Store. Anyone can now dream up a custom GPT, define the parameters and upload some bespoke information to GPT-4, which can then build it for you and pop it on the store, with revenue split between creators and OpenAI.

CEO Sam Altman demonstrated this onstage by whipping up a program called Startup Mentor that gives advice to budding entrepreneurs. Users soon followed, dreaming up everything from an AI that does the commentary for sporting events to a “roast my website” GPT. ChatGPT went down for 90 minutes this week, possibly as a result of too many users trying out the new features. 

Not everyone was impressed, however. Abacus.ai CEO Bindu Reddy said it was disappointing that GPT-5 had not been announced, suggesting that OpenAI tried to train a new model earlier this year but found it “didn’t run as efficiently and therefore had to scrap it.” There are rumors that OpenAI is training a new candidate for GPT-5 called Gobi, Reddy said, but she suspects it won’t be unveiled until next year. 

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X unveils Grok

Elon Musk brought freedom back to Twitter — mainly by freeing lots of people from spending any time there — and he’s on a mission to do the same with AI.

The beta version of Grok AI was thrown together in just two months, and while it’s not nearly as good as GPT-4, it is up to date due to being trained on tweets, which means it can tell you what Joe Rogan was wearing on his last podcast. That’s the sort of information GPT-4 simply won’t tell you.

There are fewer guardrails on the answers than ChatGPT, although if you ask it how to make cocaine it will snarkily tell you to “Obtain a chemistry degree and a DEA license.”

“The threshold for what it will tell you, if pushed, is what is available on the internet via reasonable browser search, which is a lot …” says Musk.

Within a few days, more than 400 cryptocurrencies linked to GROK had been launched. One amassed a $10 million market cap, and at least ten others rugpulled. 

All Killer No Filler AI News

— Samsung has introduced a new generative artificial intelligence model called Gauss that it suggests will be added to its phones and devices soon.

YouTube has rolled out some new AI features to premium subscribers including a chatbot that summarizes videos and answers questions about them, and another that categorizes the comments to help creators understand the feedback. 

— Google DeepMind has released an AGI tier list that starts at the “No AI” level of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and moves on to “Emerging AGI,” where ChatGPT, Bard and LLama2 are listed. The other tiers are Competent, Expert, Virtuoso and Artificial Superintelligence, none of which have been achieved yet. 

Amazon is investing millions in a new GPT-4 rival called Olympus that is twice the size at 2 trillion parameters. It has also been testing out its new humanoid robot called Digit at trade shows. This one fell over.

Pics of the week

An oldie but a goodie, Alvaro Cintas has spent his weekend coming up with AI pun pictures under the heading “Wonders of the World, Misspelled by AI”.

Andrew Fenton

Andrew Fenton

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

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I’ve followed the PM wherever he goes in his first year in office – here’s what I’ve observed

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I've followed the PM wherever he goes in his first year in office - here's what I've observed

July 5 2024, 1pm: I remember the moment so clearly.

Keir Starmer stepped out of his sleek black car, grasped the hand of his wife Vic, dressed in Labour red, and walked towards a jubilant crowd of Labour staffers, activists and MPs waving union jacks and cheering a Labour prime minister into Downing Street for the first time in 14 years.

Starmer and his wife took an age to get to the big black door, as they embraced those who had helped them win this election – their children hidden in the crowd to watch their dad walk into Number 10.

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Keir Starmer, not the easiest public speaker, came to the podium and told the millions watching this moment the “country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal”.

He spoke about the “weariness at the heart of the nation” and “the lack of trust” in our politicians as a “wound” that “can only be healed by actions not words”. He added: “This will take a while but the work of change begins immediately.”

A loveless landslide

That was a day in which this prime minister made history. His was a victory on a scale that comes around but one every few decades.

He won the largest majority in a quarter of a century and with it a massive opportunity to become one of the most consequential prime ministers of modern Britain – alongside the likes of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.

But within the win was a real challenge too.

👉 Click here to listen to Electoral Dysfunction on your podcast app 👈

Starmer’s was a loveless landslide, won on a lower share of the vote than Blair in all of his three victories and 6 percentage points lower than the 40% Jeremy Corbyn secured in the 2017 general election.

It was the lowest vote share than any party forming a post-war majority government. Support for Labour was as shallow as it was wide.

In many ways then, it was a landslide built on shaky foundations: low public support, deep mistrust of politicians, unhappiness with the state of public services, squeezed living standards and public finances in a fragile state after the huge cost of the pandemic and persistent anaemic growth.

Put another way, the fundamentals of this Labour government, whatever Keir Starmer did, or didn’t do, were terrible. Blair came in on a new dawn. This Labour government, in many ways, inherited the scorched earth.

The one flash of anger I’ve seen

For the past year, I have followed Keir Starmer around wherever he goes. We have been to New York, Washington (twice), Germany (twice), Brazil, Samoa, Canada, Ukraine, the Netherlands and Brussels. I can’t even reel off the places we’ve been to around the UK – but suffice to say we’ve gone to all the nations and regions.

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Starmer pushed on scale of “landslide” election win

What I have witnessed in the past year is a prime minister who works relentlessly hard. When we flew for 27 hours non-stop to Samoa last autumn to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) summit, every time I looked up at the plane, I saw a solitary PM, his headlight shining on his hair, working away as the rest of us slept or watched films.

He also seems almost entirely unflappable. He rarely expresses emotion. The only time I have seen a flash of anger was when I questioned him about accepting freebies in a conversation that ended up involving his family, and when Elon Musk attacked Jess Phillips.

I have also witnessed him being buffeted by events in a way that he would not have foreseen. The arrival of Donald Trump into the White House has sucked the prime minister into a whirlwind of foreign crises that has distracted him from domestic events.

When he said over the weekend, as a way of explanation not an excuse, that he had been caught up in other matters and taken his eye off the ball when it came to the difficulties of welfare reform, much of Westminster scoffed, but I didn’t.

I had followed him around in the weeks leading up to that vote. We went from the G7 in Canada, to the Iran-Israel 12-day war, to the NATO summit in the Hague, as the prime minister dealt with, in turn, the grooming gangs inquiry decision, the US-UK trade deal, Donald Trump, de-escalation in the Middle East and a tricky G7 summit, the assisted dying vote, the Iran-Israel missile crisis.

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In September 2024, the PM defended taking £20k GCSE donation

He was taking so many phone calls on Sunday morning from Chequers, that he couldn’t get back to London for COBRA [national emergency meeting] because he couldn’t afford to not have a secure phone line for the hour-long drive back to Downing Street.

He travelled to NATO, launched the National Security Review and agreed to the defence alliance’s commitment to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. So when he came back from the Hague into a full-blown welfare rebellion, I did have some sympathy for him – he simply hadn’t had the bandwidth to deal with the rebellion as it began to really gather steam.

Dealing with rebellion

Where I have less sympathy with the prime minister and his wider team is how they let it get to that point in the first place.

Keir Starmer wasn’t able to manage the latter stages of the rebellion, but the decisions made months earlier set it up in all its glory, while Downing Street’s refusal to heed the concerns of MPs gave it momentum to spiral into a full-blown crisis.

The whips gave warning after 120 MPs signed a letter complaining about the measures, the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall had done the same, but Starmer and Reeves were, in the words of one minister, “absolutist”.

“They assumed people complaining about stuff do it because they are weak, rather than because they are strong,” said the minister, who added that following the climbdown, figures in Number 10 “just seemed completely without knowledge of the gravity of it”.

That he marks his first anniversary with the humiliation of having to abandon his flagship welfare reforms or face defeat in the Commons – something that should be unfathomable in the first year of power with a majority that size – is disappointing.

To have got it that wrong, that quickly with your parliamentary party, is a clear blow to his authority and is potentially more chronic. I am not sure yet how he recovers.

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Welfare vote ‘a blow to the prime minister’

Keir Starmer said he wanted to rule country first, party second, but finds himself pinned by a party refusing to accept his centrist approach. Now, ministers tell MPs that there will be a financial consequence of the government’s decision to delay tightening the rules on claiming disability benefits beyond the end of 2026.

A shattered Rachel Reeves now has to find the £5bn she’d hoped to save another way. She will defend her fiscal rules, which leaves her the invidious choice of tax rises or spending cuts. Sit back and watch for the growing chorus of MPs that will argue Starmer needs to raise more taxes and pivot to the left.

That borrowing costs of UK debt spiked on Wednesday amid speculation that the chancellor might resign or be sacked, is a stark reminder that Rachel Reeves, who might be unpopular with MPs, is the markets’ last line of defence against spending-hungry Labour MPs. The party might not like her fiscal rules, but the markets do.

What’s on the horizon for year two?

The past week has set the tone now for the prime minister’s second year in office. Those around him admit that the parliamentary party is going to be harder to govern. For all talk of hard choices, they have forced the PM to back down from what were cast as essential welfare cuts and will probably calculate that they can move him again if they apply enough pressure.

There is also the financial fall-out, with recent days setting the scene for what is now shaping up to be another definitive budget for a chancellor who now has to fill a multi-billion black hole in the public finances.

But I would argue that the prime minister has misjudged the tone as he marks that first year. Faced with a clear crisis and blow to his leadership, instead of tackling that head on the prime minister sought to ignore it and try to plough on, embarking on his long-planned launch of the 10-year NHS plan to mark his year in office, as if the chancellor’s tears and massive Labour rebellions over the past 48 hours were mere trifles.

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Why was the chancellor crying at PMQs?

It was inevitable that this NHS launch would be overshadowed by the self-inflicted shambles over welfare and the chancellor’s distress, given this was the first public appearance of both of them since it had all blown up.

But when I asked the prime minister to explain how it had gone so wrong on welfare and how he intended to rebuild your trust and authority in your party, he completely ignored my question. Instead, he launched into a long list of Labour’s achievements in his first year: 4 million extra NHS appointments; free school meals to half a million more children; more free childcare; the biggest upgrade in employment rights for a generation; and the US, EU and India free trade deals.

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Starmer defends reaction to Reeves crying in PMQs

I can understand the point he was making and his frustration that his achievements are being lost in the maelstrom of the political drama. But equally, this is politics, and he is the prime minister. This is his story to tell, and blowing up your welfare reform on the anniversary week of your government is not the way to do it.

Is Starmer failing to articulate his mission?

For Starmer himself, he will do what I have seen him do before when he’s been on the ropes, dig in, learn from the errors and try to come back stronger. I have heard him in recent days talk about how he has always been underestimated and then proved he can do it – he is approaching this first term with the same grit.

If you ask his team, they will tell you that the prime minister and this government is still suffering from the unending pessimism that has pervaded our national consciousness; the sense politics doesn’t work for working people and the government is not on their side.

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Fiscal rules are silly but important

Starmer knows what he needs to do: restore the social contract, so if you work hard you should get on in life. The spending review and its massive capital investment, the industrial strategy and strategic defence review – three pieces of work dedicated to investment and job creation – are all geared to trying to rebuild the country and give people a brighter future.

But equally, government has been, admit insiders, harder than they thought as they grapple with multiple crises facing the country – be that public services, prisons, welfare.

It has also lacked direction. Sir Keir would do well to focus on following his Northern Star. I think he has one – to give working people a better life and ordinary people the chance to fulfil their potential.

But somehow, the prime minister is failing to articulate his mission, and he knows that. When I asked him at the G7 summit in Canada what his biggest mistake of the first year was, he told me: “We haven’t always told our story as well as we should.”

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Beth Rigby asks the PM to reflect on a year in office

I go back to the Keir Starmer of July 5 2024. He came in on a landslide, he promised to change the country, he spoke of the lack of trust and the need to prove to the public that the government could make their lives better through actions not words.

In this second year, he is betting that the legislation he has passed and strategies he has launched will drive that process of change, and in doing so, build back belief.

But it is equally true that his task has become harder these past few weeks. He has spilled so much blood over welfare for so little gain, his first task is to reset the operation to better manage the party and rebuild support.

But bigger than that, he needs to find a way to not just tell his government’s story but sell his government’s story. He has four years left.

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Did Keir Starmer screw up his own anniversary?

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Did Keir Starmer screw up his own anniversary?

👉 Click here to listen to Electoral Dysfunction on your podcast app 👈

Sir Keir Starmer wanted to be talking about what he sees as Labour’s achievements after 12 months in government and his 10-year plan for the NHS.

But, after another dramatic policy U-turn and the sight of his own chancellor crying at PMQs, when he kept his support for her slightly vague, Beth Rigby, Harriet Harman and Ruth Davidson discuss if his start in office has been shattered by this week.

They also wonder if the solution to make relations with his own MPs a bit easier would be to make better use of Angela Rayner.

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US Republicans declare ‘Crypto Week’ to mull 3 crypto bills

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US Republicans declare ‘Crypto Week’ to mull 3 crypto bills

US Republicans declare ‘Crypto Week’ to mull 3 crypto bills

US Republican leaders say the House will look to pass bills on stablecoins, crypto market structure and CBDCs in mid-July in what they’ve dubbed “Crypto Week.”

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