Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 1: The best money for AI is crypto
For every genuine blockchain project harnessing artificial intelligence in an attempt to create a better world — like Dr Ben Goertzel’s Singularity.net — there are 100 coins like AI Doge that have simply wedged the hyped-up terms “AI” and “Crypto” together to flog tokens.
“Those are just fundamental buzzwords,” explains Near blockchain founder Illia Polosukhin, who worked on the groundbreaking “Attention Is All You Need” research that led to large language models like ChatGPT and Claude.
As one of the few people in the world who are as well versed in AI as they are in crypto, Polosukhin says that if you ignore the hype, the technologies really are a good fit.
“There’s a lot of specific things both in AI and Web3 that can use each other or benefit each other,” he says.
Magazine spoke with Polosukhin, Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen, Richard Ma from Quantstamp, Ralf Kubli from Casper and others to examine some of the key hype-free, genuine use cases for AI in crypto and blockchain.
Over the next week, we’re rolling out one genuine use case for AI in crypto each day — including reasons why you shouldn’t necessarily believe the hype.
The best money for AI is crypto
Everyone from Circle boss Jeremy Allaire to former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes to Animoca Brand’s Yat Siu is convinced that crypto will be the currency of choice for AI agents.
After all, LLMs are unable to get access to bank accounts but can easily make payments using a funded crypto wallet, and they’re well suited to interacting with the logic of smart contracts and DeFi protocols.
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The humans delegating the funds in the wallet can set the overarching strategies and rules, and then observe how the AI agent has performed using the transparent record on the blockchain.
Allaire says that AI “and blockchains are made for each other,” with the tech suited to “machine-generated and enforced contracts” and “machine-to-machine value exchange.”
Completely agree. AI and Blockchains are made for each other. Provenance of data, machine generated and enforced contracts, and machine to machine value exchange. We are already hearing about AI Bots spinning up on-chain wallets and using USDC. https://t.co/BwmdGdVufJ
— Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) May 25, 2023
Hayes believes that Bitcoin is the most logical payment system for AI as it is “available at all times, digital and completely automated” and enables the AI to pay for “data and compute power—in order to ‘stay alive.’”
That said, Hayes also seems to think AIs will live for trillions of years “until the heat death of the universe,” and the LLMs will, therefore, choose Bitcoin as it can be mined by robots. So sometimes Hayes’ ideas tend to get away from him.
Animoca Brands Executive Chairman and founder Yat Siu is another high-profile industry figure who believes that crypto is the only logical way for AIs to transact “with each other as autonomous beings in future.”
“In the future, 70-80% of transactions will happen through autonomous AI agents and the decentralised nature of crypto makes it a perfect match.”
But don’t take the word of puny humans: ChatGPT also chooses crypto as its preferred currency without any nudges in that direction.
Trading bots that are able to buy and sell crypto already account for up to 80% of spot volumes, and it’s likely these existing automated bots will progressively be replaced by more intelligent AI agents. (Be warned, however, that LLM-based trading experiments like Autopilot’s GPT Portfolio have seen mixed results so far, so putting your funds under the control of an AI is going to be a risky proposition for a while.)
Members of Near DAO have begun experimenting with allowing an AI to decide whether a particular new project satisfies the relevant grant criteria to fund it autonomously from the treasury.
How to add Bitcoin and crypto payments to an AI agent
It’s certainly easy enough to integrate crypto payments with AI. Lightning Labs has released a set of developer tools that enable GPT-4 to buy, sell and hold Bitcoin using the layer 2 network. And AI startup Fewsats has already created an agent that is able to pay Lightning Network invoices.
I don’t want you to freak out, but my @OpenAI agent just paid a LN invoice for me ?
First time #ChatGPT paid in #Bitcoin ? pic.twitter.com/811JdtJ3iB
— fewsats (@fewsats) November 14, 2023
Fetch.Ai also offers a service where you can create an AI agent that is able to make payments on your behalf.
Syndicate.io founder Ian Dao Lee recently wrote a blog detailing how he was able to knock up a GPT in just a few hours, using OpenAi’s APIs and Syndicate’s Transaction Cloud, which is able to autonomously make USDC payments from a Safe wallet on the Base network.
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He’s excited about the possibilities this holds. “The ability for AI to pay for things, hold things of value, exchange value, or create things of value — on behalf of itself or others — is how AI gets true agency,” he says.
“Some of the most interesting ideas open up not only when AI agents can transact on behalf of and with people, businesses, or other AI agents — but also when AI agents can manage things of value and transact on behalf of themselves.”
Lee believes that in the future, AI agents will be able to shop for things autonomously, manage the finances of people and organizations, determine and hand out funding approvals or try and grow wealth to help others.
However, it turns out that AIs are just as stingy with their money as humans are, donating an underwhelming $3 to charity.
Don’t believe the hype
While AI can more easily use crypto at present, banks appear eager to adopt AI for a variety of uses and already use it extensively for the detection of financial fraud.
Payment companies like Brex are working on integrating AI with corporate bank accounts to allow AI agents to automatically make payments in defined circumstances, such as travel expenses.
And a team of researchers recently put out a preprint describing how they successfully trained an AI agent called MM-Navigator to work out how to search through Amazon for a given product within a certain budget and to buy it.
Until crypto payments are more widely accepted, fiat still has a lot of advantages when dealing with businesses in the real world.
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Politics
Red Wall MPs should focus on two-child benefit cap rather than winter fuel, Harriet Harman says
Red Wall MPs should push for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted rather than a reversal of the winter fuel payment policy, Baroness Harriet Harman has said.
Baroness Harman, the former Labour Party chair, told Sky’s Electoral Dysfunction podcast that this would hand the group a “progressive win” rather than simply “protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer” over winter fuel.
Earlier this week, a number of MPs in the Red Wall – Labour’s traditional heartlands in the north of England – reposted a statement on social media in which they said the leadership’s response to the local elections had “fallen on deaf ears”.
They singled out the cut to the winter fuel allowance as an issue that was raised on the doorstep and urged the government to rethink the policy, arguing doing so “isn’t weak, it takes us to a position of strength”.
Labour’s decision to means test the policy has snatched the benefit away from millions of pensioners.
But Baroness Harman said a better target for the group could be an overhaul of George Osborne’s two-child benefit cap.
The cap, announced in 2015 as part of Lord David Cameron’s austerity measures, means while parents can claim child tax credit or Universal Credit payments for their first and second child, they can’t make claims for any further children they have.
Labour faced pressure to remove the cap in the early months of government, with ministers suggesting in February that they were considering relaxing the limit.
Baroness Harman told Beth Rigby that this could be a sensible pressure point for Red Wall MPs to target.
She said: “It could be that they have a kind of progressive win, and it might not be a bad thing to do in the context of an overall strategy on child poverty.
“Let’s see whether instead of just protesting and annoying Sir Keir Starmer, they can build a bridge to a new progressive set of policies.”
Jo White, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw and a member of the Red Wall group, suggested that her party’s “connection” to a core group of voters “died” with the decision to means test the winter fuel payment for pensioners.
“We need to reset the government,” she told Electoral Dysfunction. “The biggest way to do that is by tackling issues such as winter fuel payments.
“I think we should raise the thresholds so that people perhaps who are paying a higher level of tax are the only people who are exempt from getting it.”
Pic: AP
A group of MPs in the Red Wall, thought to number about 40, met on Tuesday night following the fallout of local election results in England, which saw Labour lose the Runcorn by-election and control of Doncaster Council to Reform UK.
Following the results, Sir Keir said “we must deliver that change even more quickly – we must go even further”.
Some Labour MPs believe it amounted to ignoring voters’ concerns.
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Starmer faces rebellion from Labour MPs over welfare reforms
One of the MPs who was present at the meeting told Sky News there was “lots of anger at the government’s response to the results”.
“People acknowledged the winter fuel allowance was the main issue for us on the doorstep,” they said.
“There is a lack of vision from this government.”
Another added: “Everyone was furious.”
Downing Street has ruled out a U-turn on means testing the winter fuel payment, following newspaper reports earlier this week that one might be on the cards.
A man from the US state of Virginia will spend over three decades behind bars after being convicted of sending crypto to the terrorist organization commonly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Federal Judge David Novak sentenced Mohammed Azharuddin Chhipa to 30 years and four months in prison on May 7 for sending over $185,000 to the Islamic State, the Department of Justice said on May 8.
Prosecutors said that from around October 2019 until October 2022, the 35-year-old Chhipa collected and sent money to female Islamic State members in Syria, which helped them escape prison camps and funded fighting.
The Justice Department said Chhipa would raise funds for the United Nations-designated terror organization through social media — receiving money online, or traveling hundreds of miles to accept donations in person.
He’d convert the money into crypto and send it to Turkey for it to be smuggled to Islamic State members across the border in Syria, prosecutors said.
A federal jury convicted Chhipa in December, finding him guilty on a charge of conspiracy to provide support to a terrorist organization and four charges of providing and attempting to provide support to a terrorist organization.
“This defendant directly financed ISIS in its efforts to commit vile terrorist atrocities against innocent citizens in America and abroad,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “This severe sentence illustrates that if you fund terrorism, we will prosecute you and put you behind bars for decades.”
Chhipa tried to flee US during FBI probe
Prosecutors said that during the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation into Chhipa, he tried to flee the country to escape prosecution and tried to hide his tracks through a series of actions seemingly aimed at confusing authorities.
According to a motion for detention filed in August, FBI agents searched Chhipa’s house on Aug. 2, 2019, and that night Chhipa drove to a bank, withdrew $1,800 from an ATM, and then went to a Taco Bell, where he paid a stranger for a ride to a relative’s house. The relative then drove him to a grocery store.
Related: US Treasury sanctions Myanmar militia group for alleged crypto scams
Three days later, prosecutors said Chhipa “purchased a series of bus tickets using variations and/or misspelling of his name and recently created email accounts.”
He then travelled from Virginia to Mexico and onto Guatemala. He then bought tickets to fly from Guatemala to Panama, then onto Germany, and then to Egypt, but an Interpol Blue Notice was issued, and he was returned to the US.
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