TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #773: Open Source AI Is Non-Negotiable with Conner Brown

Starting point is 00:00:00 you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. DC, it's easy to get to from Philadelphia. I think I want to be here a lot more.

Starting point is 00:00:40 We need you here, Marty. Do you? We need you here in the trenches. Yeah, we've got PubKey now. We've got the office set up. We need more Marty Bent. We need rips all the time in DC. I prefer them in person, as you know.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Yeah. We've only ever recorded in person. Yes. This is the third time now. As is tradition. we didn't wait what was it seven eight years between uh the second and third like we did with the first and second right we're gonna keep these recurring basis a lot's gonna be happening in dc dc is gonna be you know the new up-and-coming important city i think yeah everyone likes to

Starting point is 00:01:10 talk about austin and miami but this is where a lot of stuff is going to happen over the next five ten years with all the technology changes like dc is going to be the true city to be in i think in the coming years that's why i told you this last time i was here i've been to the city more times in the last six months than i was in the first 34 years of my life yeah i mean i'm not saying it's a great thing um i would prefer it not be the place that the magic is happening and then uh but just with the way things are headed um yeah i do unfortunately think it's important that we're here yes a couple things on the agenda today we're going to talk about ai not only the policy implications around AI, but actually implementing it in our businesses, particularly

Starting point is 00:01:55 at BPI and what you guys have been up to. I think it's very fitting that we're meeting today because you guys launched the Q2 report of what BPI has been up to this year. So I think starting there and going through all the policy efforts that you guys have been pushing forward and the wins and maybe losses or neutral victories you guys may have. Yeah, gosh. Um, so much stuff going on, but I think at the corner of it, it's just, uh, this technology continues to improve, um, whether it be both with Bitcoin and AI, and that is just speeding

Starting point is 00:02:33 up the pace of change. Uh, we're seeing it in our organization. We're seeing it in what we're being tasked with, um, in different meetings and stuff. And so, um, it's really, it's been a lot. yesterday we released what we did over just the past three months and it's crazy i was reading through it and i just couldn't believe how much we got accomplished in three months and um you know people say like ai is going to like replace all our jobs and stuff and like everyone i know is working harder than they ever have before because suddenly all of these sort of stray

Starting point is 00:03:06 ideas that you're like oh i don't have the people or time to do that you can actually just roll up your sleeves and do it with like an afternoon um and so yeah it has been sort of overwhelming we've been doing a lot of new international work we've been doing lots of new research that we're able to build out much deeper than we had been previously so yeah it's been a whirlwind really since i joined i mean we last spoke when i first joined bpi and um just the change in the organization since then has been crazy crazy um and we're really excited for what it means for the next five years of what we'd be able to build here in dc yeah well let's start internationally yeah taiwan how did that happen so taiwan this is a perfect example we had an idea for a research

Starting point is 00:03:52 paper uh one of our fellow we said hey uh jake you have a background in dod would you be interested in doing a paper on taiwan's cash reserve why diversifying into bitcoin would make sense for them and he was excited for it um taiwan has a really interesting history i didn't know this but taiwan exists entirely because they use their gold as a strategic resource to like flee the country basically so the only reason taiwan exists is because they airlifted all their gold outside of mainland china and were able to fund a government exile and so we thought oh that'd that'd be interesting um we have the research expertise we'll just do a paper sort of thought experiment and then we get an email like two weeks after we released it with photos from taiwan's

Starting point is 00:04:44 legislature and they're like your paper was amazing um it is from a member of congress legislator ka he emails us photos of him delivering our paper to the uh premier of the legislative yuan the head of the central bank and um we were just like oh my gosh this is crazy and then a few weeks after that we got invited to go and brief them for a week so um another thing that's been keeping us busy is lots of international travel so what can you share about what was shared in the briefing or the information that was exchanged i can say that Taiwan, every person we talk to is really, really cognizant of the geopolitical situation they're in. It feels like the weight of the world is on them and they're bringing it up all the time.

Starting point is 00:05:36 They know that they've always been in this tenuous position between the United States and China and that every day they feel like the stakes are higher because the strategic importance of Taiwan goes up every day. as the compute build out accelerates and there's more and more value on the island and um it just leaves them in this like strange psychological position where everyone is thinking about it constantly like what does this mean for us what does it mean for the people of taiwan for a long time we had this principle of the silicon shield that america would defend taiwan's national interest it would defend them in a military escalation because of how valuable their chips are in many ways that's an even stronger case today than it was 20 years ago but at the same time it can also be seen as a reason that china is even more likely to intervene

Starting point is 00:06:31 because they're now not just um have this historical rift but they have a strategic element here of uh you know china is trying to figure out what it means for like could they actually pull off a blockade all that and everyone in taiwan knows that people on both sides are trying to figure out what their plan is and that just came through across every conversation we had we met with people from both the different parties there the dpp and the kmt are the two ruling political parties there the dpp currently has the majority and And the KMT as an opposition party is leaning more towards some form of reconciliation or, you know, some sort of lessening of sort of hostilities with China. And it's it's just really, really interesting political dynamic.

Starting point is 00:07:30 If you look at all the other policy issues for the parties, they pretty much agree on, I don't know, 90 percent of policy issues. that's what i was going to ask like how is the partisan polarity over there it's uh it's it's very very strong but it's just on this issue of reconciliation what side do we end up what side do we lean towards um and i i think that both of them are just coming to grips with it it's like it's like what everything else we do like it's so hard to predict the future right now because of ai the strategic questions wrapped up in that and taiwan feels it probably stronger than anywhere else on earth i mean it's just in the daily conversation all the time um so what i can share is we met at length with their head regulator and for their their financial services commission and

Starting point is 00:08:26 um and the central bank of taiwan and it was my first time meeting um people from a foreign central bank super interesting i went over there not really knowing what to expect so you know you write a paper on bitcoin uh i've met many central bankers you know over the years working in policy and i think everyone has always been extremely skeptical of bitcoin you know arm's length oh yeah nice to meet you pleasantries this was the first time i walked into a briefing they had read our report cover to cover all the different members of the taiwanese central bank had taken extensive notes and had really really good questions actually about the reasoning the practicalities without going into too much detail i was surprised at

Starting point is 00:09:20 their hospitality their level of understanding the quality of their questions it was just a fantastic experience we want to go back and um yeah so hopefully more updates on that soon but yeah i think that this is something that is easy to forget about is what a signal that the american administration has sent to the world um you know no one is ever excited with the pace of change in dc or how you know fast or slow things go but things like the executive order for the SBR like that is still being digested actively and everyone around the world is trying to figure out what it means you know what to do with that so it was it was a really really cool experience and it was

Starting point is 00:10:10 my first time being there so it's just all around just fantastic yeah SBR they're fighting over who actually gets control over the reserve right now right it's between commerce yeah Treasury I mean it was something that we kind of scratched our heads at a little bit when the eo first came out which was they've jointly delegated authority between treasury and commerce to execute the sbr executive order and um i think they're just still trying to figure out exactly how do they do this how do they build up the capacity i mean it's been sort of embarrassing for the administration a bit um you know they had that scandal where they gave custody of the marshals funds to you know a contractor with shady origins

Starting point is 00:10:57 whose son then ran off with some of the money i mean it's just like uh comical it's it really is just like a circus um so in true government fashion it's always slower than you would expect but i do i mean what we've heard is um you know there are lots of things happening um that people were trying to get things stood up and there's just like an endless series of bureaucratic hurdles um but they say expect something soon so two weeks tm we know that well here yeah two weeks two weeks two weeks to flatten the curve two weeks to execute the sbreo i don't know bring it back international uk uk yeah another thing we went over there um And I guess what we're seeing is what happened in D.C. and with the new administration has just want all of these other governments are wanting to get the inside scoop from the people that work through the process of what how is the U.S. thinking about this and how can they be a fast follow?

Starting point is 00:12:05 that was the we went over to the uk and heard that term like 100 times the uk wants to be a fast follow and um it was honestly pretty surprising so i went over there just sort of expecting that they would like throw me in jail if i was looking at twitter and instead like surprisingly positive um you know they had just announced a cap on stablecoin balances and then the week we went over there they actually rescinded that And they're still, like many other governments, trying to wrap their head around what all of this means. But again, surprised by the level of openness.

Starting point is 00:12:46 We met with people and we did a briefing in the House of Lords, it was a ton of fun. First time being in there. It was in the parliament building, so it felt like. A lot of pageantry involved. Lots of pageantry. They have statues in there from like 1600s. I tried to take a photo.

Starting point is 00:13:04 got accosted by some security guard looked like the hogwarts like cafeteria but uh yeah surprisingly optimistic there too um you know afterwards the head of their uh is like a head of innovation at their fca put out a thing about the importance of bitcoin policy i mean we have to remember like these people they don't even understand the difference between bitcoin and shitcoin they don't understand how bitcoin is different from the parade of horribles they hear about and they are very interested in the story we have to tell um so i think like the lessons learned is you have to tell the story in a way that relates to their history you know when we go over there we talk about hey you know newton set you guys up on the gold standard and that paved the way

Starting point is 00:13:57 for 200 years of british empire so those are the types of stakes that are at play here and um i think explaining in those like broader historical terms same with taiwan you know we talked a lot about their historical use of gold as funding government and exile relating to those longer term historical narratives for a country um same here in america is the key to getting people to understand the policy implications yeah it's incredible work it's exhausting um thank you i mean we got a lot more to do yeah there's no shortage of work yeah well i mean you guys are the hot chick on the block not because of bitcoin because ai i mean bringing this back bringing this back to taiwan yeah um you guys i think sam

Starting point is 00:14:43 spearheaded the the report basically unearthing that china has been influencing conversations around ai data centers here in the united states yeah um that started as like we were saying with ai you can just do so much more so it started as sort of like i don't know uh a side bit you know people had mentioned to us um you know bitcoin miners mentioned to us they've been seeing just unprecedented local opposition and that they've been doing this for years and they're used to some local concerns obviously with any major infrastructure project people are going to have questions um but a few months ago they said you know we've we're seeing the same local people that have concerns typical stuff we're also seeing this new thing which is people

Starting point is 00:15:31 from out of town that um while the local people will ask a reasonable question like okay what is the where is this going to be located is this going to create noise is this going to impact me xyz way there would be these people from out of town that would really aggressively say this is going to give everyone an aneurysm right or this is going to destroy all the bees in the area i heard that no bees could ever exist within 50 miles of a data center is that true just like ludicrous things and um they were like we've never seen this before can you guys see if there's you anything going on we said yeah we'll take a look at it and um we just got sam lyman that joined so he came over from treasury and sam has experience dealing with this stuff so he used

Starting point is 00:16:20 to he was at riot right used to work at riot he's you know done the rounds in like local communities in texas working on the stuff and he just kind of started pulling the thread and you start going through these different layers of non-profits and all the different activist groups that are on the ground and mobilizing and um it just kind of shocked all of us and then it just all sort of worked out in the virality of it because everyone's talking about data centers now and we were really the first to sort of put all the pieces together and say well actually if you look at all these different projects we're seeing a common element which is the party for socialism and liberation um are functioning as at least important organizers in a lot of these debates

Starting point is 00:17:13 and they have sort of a you know dubious history so yeah it's been it's been a whirlwind past couple of months as that story broke who's the individual behind all of it who's very vocally anti we don't know who is like a lot of there's a lot of questions about the organization what we know is that um someone named neville singham roy or neville roy singham um is a you know very wealthy philanthropist that lives at least part of the time uh in shanghai has said a lot of positive things that sort of align um his views with those of of china and he is at least funding some non-profits that are doing anti-data center stuff um it is there's a lot of dark money involved it's a lot of it is sort of unclear and we're trying to piece it all together and

Starting point is 00:18:12 understand exactly what's happening um but yeah i'd encourage anyone that's interested in this read our reports we have two different foreign influence reports in the case for american ai that sort of go over exactly what this non-profit structure looks like sort of all the different elements of foreign influence we've identified um and we've sort of detailed case studies of what we're seeing on the ground and um the one thing i do want to say is this is not to say in any way shape or form that americans themselves don't have legitimate concerns about this massive multi multi-billion dollar trillion dollar build out of compute multi-trillion at this point yeah i mean it's like huge in its implications these projects are larger than anything we've ever built

Starting point is 00:19:00 before and are going to continue to just scale up over time people have many legitimate questions about that how is that going to change their way of life i don't think that the narratives that you know, anthropic or some of these effective altruist groups are putting out are compelling to the everyday American. And that is manifesting in a lot of concerns about this build out. So all of that, I think there are legitimate concerns and fears about AI and these data centers, their impact. But a proper accounting of this means you need to also think, OK, is there foreign influence? What does that look like? Because there are strategic questions at play um and we know that our adversaries are savvy they understand how social media works

Starting point is 00:19:49 they understand that in modern global great power competition you're usually not fighting with boots on the ground fifth generation warfare yeah the podcast i recorded this morning we talked all about it yeah yeah i mean it's just it is the the modern battlefield is on twitter and instagram and um they are i i think that we're just seeing like the latest in well that's why in the stuff we should all be thankful the bpi exists we try to do our part at tftc but you have to engage in fifth generation warfare and that means going pulling on the threads writing the reports getting it out there and i mean was that the most viral thing you guys have ever done finally not related to bitcoin um yeah it was probably the most viral i mean we're on the front page of new

Starting point is 00:20:32 times last week so um but you know just the beginning just beginning i think there might have been i don't know i mean the numbers on it have just been insane yeah you know it's one of those things you hit at the right time and get circulated by the right people mark andreessen tells all his followers to read it and then the internet explodes you know yeah i mean and that's why we're that's why i'm in town today is for the event tonight which is talking about energy policy data centers uh the intersection and how we should think about these things approach them and i had a conversation last night if you listened to the previous episode you're getting this again but i think it's important to reiterate to connor i i was sitting down with somebody who

Starting point is 00:21:11 was uh involved in one of the largest utility companies in the united states and we were just talking shop about like all right how do you how do you educate the masses about this because that's i think one of the biggest uphill battles we have and bitcoiners i think know this um more deeply than the ai data center people now because we've been doing this for 10 years but there is a lack of understanding of energy the grid how all these things work how data centers bitcoin mining operations how they interact and how they affect um your ability to access cheap electricity and that's why i'm happy that american bitcoin pub key and pub care starting this the series which would go for the next 10 months but having conversations around these things and um

Starting point is 00:21:57 i think to your point about social media it's like packaging it and getting it out there in a way which i think your report did very well yeah i mean it's it's so important to tell the story and i do think it is critical to bitcoin as well is people if if we are going down a path where people are hostile to just energy production generally um that is not good for anyone um but but really it's not surprising what we're seeing either because what we're seeing is uh a big tech executive gets up and says well ai is probably going to be as dangerous as pandemics and nuclear weapons combined and it in the process is also going to take your job and the jobs of everyone you know and um yeah we're going to keep building it

Starting point is 00:22:49 OK, how is this going to be compelled? Like this is not compelling for anyone. And I think it's just such a break from the American tradition of leaning into innovation and entrepreneurship and the optimism of building great things. That is what has made people inspired and want to come to America and want to build here. and uh what causes people to get up every day and build great companies is human achievement and greatness and energy is at the bottom of all of that and uh you know i'm really excited there's a lot of really really great startups now that are getting into i'm really glad to see their startups that are doing real hard tech um energy production breakthroughs and stuff like velar atomics or whatever um you know i saw that on twitter it's been all over my feed

Starting point is 00:23:40 um but if we're not telling a compelling story about how technology benefits us with either bitcoin or open source ai or um you know biotechnology if we're not telling that compelling story then it's going to manifest in hostility in a million different ways all the way from the hyper-local level of not letting any of this stuff get built, all the way to federal licensing regimes, KYC for compute, surveillance of all your chat logs. It gets very, very dystopian very quickly when you start convincing everyone that this is this crazy danger that we have no precedent for how to handle. It's just not true.

Starting point is 00:24:26 It's not how our society was built. we're a society that trusts people with dangerous things we let people have guns i mean in in theory america itself was founded on the idea that the people themselves can be trusted with dangerous tools with self-government i mean this is like the core of what we believe is that the people can be trusted with things um and if they break that trust they will be prosecuted accordingly Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's, it's, it's, we've dealt with dangerous things in the past. Sup freaks. This episode is brought to you by Blocks Bitcoin ecosystem. You probably know Cash App. You probably know Square. You definitely know BitKey if you've been listening to the show

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Starting point is 00:26:47 liquidity without triggering the taxable event this is worth a serious look go to aven.com bitcoin that's a-v-e-n dot com slash bitcoin check it out i think i'm back to the ai narrative and it's one thing we've been working on at tftc too because we've been leaning in and maybe we can spitball some ideas compare notes to how we've been implementing this stuff but i think i've been trying to do this more and it's not um an attempt to brag but i think people the the broader public has an outside looking in view of ai and most of them haven't like really dove deeper than downloading chat gbt and interacting with the chatbot and i was actually um relieved to see secretary percent uh do an interview this morning we were

Starting point is 00:27:35 clipping it at tftc but talking about this exact problem where the interview was asking him dario modi is telling us it's going to take all of our jobs and you have this secretary treasury having to be like well like he's wrong about his business like if you actually look into the data um i believe that the ai proliferating people learning how to use it is actually going to lead to a um 10 like thousands of flowers of individual small businesses springing up you can do the job of 10 men 100 men with one now and if you're implementing this tech at your company which we both are it is very obvious that that is true like you said i've never worked harder in my life because i can do more but just diving into and

Starting point is 00:28:20 really bringing like a real world example of how ai is not taking any of the jobs at bpi it's extending your ability to do more jobs yeah um how are you guys implementing it yeah so So when ClaudeCode came out and then ClaudeCowork, it just completely blew our minds. We had been using these tools a lot. I was already, I guess, like a power user of this in many ways. But the transition to agentic models that can actually do full workflows is just crazy. And so we just sat down early in January and had an all staff call where we said, here's what we're doing. We're going to really lean into this. We're going to become the best

Starting point is 00:29:06 people in DC to know how to use these tools. And each of us spent, I don't know, I don't know how many hours, right? Each of us just started playing with the tools, right? We said, everyone, think about these tools. Here's a brief overview. We did a presentation for like two hours for the team and said, here's generally what they can do. We want everyone on the team to spend a lot of time using these think about your existing workflows everyone has some sort of recurring tasks they do think about how you can build these into recurring workflows and then we want you to present to the team how you're going to use this and the great thing about it is you can then encode those workflows into you know skills um and so that was a major unlock for the org because suddenly we

Starting point is 00:29:58 just had our team's skill set just started populating you know and every we had a new thing in slack of announcer skills here and people can know how to use them and so it became this force multiplier where if you needed a specific skill to be called um obviously you would if you needed something for research you talk to the head of research but if you're doing something that needs some research you can call the research skill and sort of like slot that in and um it was just like it was an incredible process to see it happen because now we're six months past that and i would say our work product is better quality than ever before we're getting a lot more traction on social media it's just very clear to me that there are going to be two types of

Starting point is 00:30:50 of organizations. And we're going to see the K-shaped divergence of the firm. There are going to be firms that start to punch well above their weight because they have leaned into gaining the expertise in these tools. And the best thing about the tools is if your team really understands not only how to use them, but how to improve them over time, give really good feedback to them, Make sure that the agents themselves are taking notes on your feedback. You can get it so that every error they present to you, you never see it again. And so now we're at a point where not only are we doing the things that we were doing six months ago better, but we're doing things that we could have never done before. You know, like our AI research on Bitcoin's preferring AI, sorry, AI agents preferring Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:31:44 That was hugely viral. we were able to build out an entire website much more interactive much more multimedia stuff we were able to do the scale of the research that wouldn't have been possible before so i think that there are obviously growing pains um we are dealing with reducing slop all the time it has become this constant sort of thorn in our side of like how do we make sure there's no slop in the organization because um you know there there are some some like you know stumbling blocks to it or things you have to learn how to manage but we deal with this too yeah it's imagine yeah but like the long view is like it's just so obvious that you're just going to have the adopters and

Starting point is 00:32:34 the people that don't take the time yeah does bpi have a company brain a company brain uh what do consider a company brain it's a persistent memory system attached to a knowledge graph so we have a company brain a tftc it's three layered so we weep uh we've leaned into harnesses we use open claw for six months and then a month ago after hearing about hermes so much like watching it from afar yeah yeah i was like all right let me try hermes so yeah we have our main agent that we use for for a lot of tasks at tftc he's in a vps that i control he we're anthropomorphic we're anthropomorph uh primorphizing these uh these machines the clanker is in the vps and that's where everything sits so we had the open claw and i i basically just went to the the open claw agent

Starting point is 00:33:28 that was running on claude yeah four six and i said hey i want to try out hermes can you spin up a hermes harness for me in your server and um just let me know when that's set up and then tell me how to create a telegram chat with that with that agent and uh i'm gonna go from there and so like set it up yeah and then connected it i wanted to a b test four sixth opus four six versus gpt five five at the time yeah um and so i had the hermes harness set up connected it to five five as the brain and played with it for a day and almost immediately i was like oh this is better than what we've done so i'm just gonna like start using this as my daily driver but because we have the company brain so in that same server we have like a three-layered

Starting point is 00:34:12 memory system it's like flat notes it's like the sole md the agent.md the skill.md files daily notes uh wiki llms so there's like flat markdown files then we have a qmd semantic search vector database which like so if i give a prompt and it has keywords in it it'll it'll query that database that lives on the server without wasting any tokens and we'll find context of us dealing with that term in the past and then we have cogne cognee which is like an obsidian vault but it's agent first and so um that's the third layer which is more expressive so you have basically terms and um vaults of particular subjects and qmd will like query like every time we talked about it then it'll go to cogni like okay we've talked about this in the past like how is it interrelational

Starting point is 00:35:04 to every other thing that that may relate to this topic and so like it gets like a full context of how we've dealt with these certain terms and it has temporal context too so it knows like when we've talked about them that is amazing and then it'll go to the lm like okay yeah based off all this context how we frame things so it has all of our transcripts all of our yeah newsletter so it now knows how we frame things and that is that has been the the most roi that we've gotten in terms of investing the time to build out a particular part of the stack is that brain it's really interesting so that sounds like you're really trying to get as close as possible to an employee who has been with the org since its inception yes has seen everything because that's

Starting point is 00:35:44 what we're doing every day when we're working there is like you're building institutional knowledge um that's very cool we're a little bit more simplistic um we use just the standard like claude enterprise subscription but we do have something similar to um a brain in a sense that we have like a shared set of context files so we've sort of curated a a project file that then has you know subfolders for every different arm in the organization and we have at the top a cloud md file that gives a basic overview of what we are and sort of all of context and all the different files within it and then explain how it can search through those files and understand what we're doing and then each one of the arms the organization will have its own subfolder

Starting point is 00:36:36 for comms or design or research or whatever and then each of those we have the you know sub-cloud and MD files for each of those subfolders, sort of example workflows, example prior precedent, and then cross-references of, all right, here is our research workflow. We expect you to do this 20-step process for doing a research report. And then once you get the user's approval or feedback, we sort of have encoded the entire life cycle of the product. So we'll start with all right if you kick off the research skill it'll start with ideation and then we have specific gates where the user provides feedback and then it'll continue working up the product and then give you another user feedback gate you know continue working up the product and then once

Starting point is 00:37:27 it finalizes the research portion they'll then hand off to the comms portion or it'll hand off the design and then comms and so we have it just as a sort of intricate folder and subfolder system with cloud md files throughout and um it seems like an assembly line yeah what do you think of it yeah exactly yeah um well that's the thing there's like a thousand ways to skin the cat it's like for your purposes like it that probably makes a lot of sense for like our purposes this makes it that's that's what's so fascinating is that the um the landscape is so wide right now everybody's like still mapping the territory too and so i just love hearing honestly like we could use both of these like we could probably use a database like that yeah for just context

Starting point is 00:38:09 about vpi and what are our positions and what are the papers we published um that would probably be a helpful thing to know how to plug in what i have noticed though is like you do have to be really careful because um you can almost like accidentally context poison yourself where you'll notice it'll keep making an error and then at some point you're like oh it's saying that because like at some point in my feedback to it it like left a note for itself that it reads every single time it gives an output and it should not be reading that note and like i've consistently found like whenever i'm having some sort of capability problem it's either problems with my prompting itself or problems with the context that i'm giving it like i'm giving it bad examples of

Starting point is 00:38:59 prior work product or something that aren't up to the standard we need and it's drawing on them for design inspiration or something and so you know always like thinking about what is the context for every single prompt and yeah trying to like it's almost like pruning or something like bonsai tree you know you want it to like constantly be improved and you know every time you use it you're in some ways you could like accidentally poison the context for future conversations or improve the context for future conversations um and teaching the employees that too of using these systems your initial implication your initial uh i don't know impulse would be if it makes a small error okay i can just like fix that myself it'll be a small tweak

Starting point is 00:39:48 but if you understand the right way to give it feedback you can provide feedback in a way that what might just be an easy fix for you now is fixed forever if you just explain hey this needs to be fixed and keep a note for yourself to never make this problem again make no mistakes make no mistakes forever going forward um but it is really great to see it's it's also just really fun yeah i find it to be like a much more fun way of working i do too it's uh i've are you voice to text or you are you typing stuff i'm voice of course yes yeah whisper flow i use super whisper oh my gosh that's great i know i mean we need to be better about this right um but uh what and i was just having this conversation with thomas because yeah i co-write the newsletter now

Starting point is 00:40:39 with my agent yeah and basically what i'll do actually does he have a name martin he's a more sophisticated marty that's amazing okay so martin is trying to i'm trying to make somebody recognizing that i i don't have the capacity to store files in my brain like right martin does on a server so he's more sophisticated he's going to be be better but i was just talking about this thomas thomas like i was writing the newsletter here at pubkey earlier and by writing the newsletter it's like hey basically my flow is i'll i was showing you yesterday i sent you a screenshot of the bpi q2 report which we covered in the newsletter today and basically i yesterday when that came out i sent a note to our bitcoin brief uh topic in our telegram chat and said hey i want to talk about

Starting point is 00:41:25 this tomorrow when we go to write the newsletter like this is one of the things we're going to cover um so i'll do that and do like anywhere from five to ten links and then morning morning of it's like okay pull up all the links all the emails i forwarded to you about stuff i want to cover and let's i want you to based off of the engagement that we've gotten in the newsletter in the past you have access to that data um on the back end of our cms like structure the newsletter in a way that will get the most engagement um but like so we're filtering i'm definitely covering these topics um machine you know uh based off the topics we want to talk about which is going to resonate the most with the audience and what they may deem most important so

Starting point is 00:42:07 so like we have a lead story and then signal stories um so then it comes back to me it's like okay i think this should be the lead today and these should be the signal stories and here's all i'm thinking about framing it and then i'll be like okay i understand why you're framing it this way but like let's tweak this that and like i talk for like 10 minutes like okay yeah here's what i want to cover frame and then it's like okay i think we're at a good spot i like the lead like signal stories like let's go right and so that puts together a draft gets in the back end our ghost cms and i read it twice and then give final edits okay messed up here and then we hit send and everybody's like oh you're not writing anywhere you're gonna like lose that skill

Starting point is 00:42:42 and i thought that for the longest time like i actually shied away from using yeah claude for writing for for a while but now i feel more comfortable for two reasons one of which is the company brain is there so it has that institutional knowledge of how we frame things how our even how our opinions have evolved over time and how like how we the the voice and the positions that we have on certain topics and it's able to inject that based off of stuff that we've talked about on the show and written when i was still manually writing um in years past the second thing is i had a conversation with somebody you know we're not going to dox him on the show uh and he completely changed my mind because people were worried like we're going to

Starting point is 00:43:21 use the art of writing i do still i do write i do type i tell people like i don't type in here i do sometimes i do still write handwritten notes i like that art that should it's an art form that should never die but he described it to me he's like we're basically just returning to the the error of the scribe and he he changed the way i prompt because he the way he describes me is like when you're talking to these things since it's an llm with like a major c vector database in the the back with like points of association like you need to give it as much context as possible so you can eliminate points of association in that matrix to give you more narrow output and so what you do is you you pretend like you're napoleon bonaparte oh my god you were you took

Starting point is 00:44:02 it out of my mind i was just about to say this right and so like go ahead it's like after a day of battle you get back to your war tent and you have like 10 scribes one for munitions replenishments one for like war philosophy like ah one for strategy like here's where we messed up today and you just talk to you spin up a bunch of sessions and each session is an individual scribe that you give a bunch of context to yep and it forces you to think from first principles and really articulate what you're trying to get out there that's so funny bitcoiners we all just like come to the same conclusions independently um have you read napoleon's biography no oh my gosh okay andrew roberts napoleon a life best book i've read in a long time um just incredible

Starting point is 00:44:46 um i think about this all the time napoleon was like the most incredible human i've ever read about he would do this he would go back he would triple dictate he would be able to dictate faster than his scribes could write things down and so he was one of the only people in recorded history that had this ability where he could do exactly what you said he could dictate tend it's similar to a grandmaster chess player who goes and plays 20 different games simultaneously and comes back and he can remember the context for the the moves he's planning napoleon would do the same thing with writing these really just incredibly detailed and important letters to all the different world leaders um all of his different troops his different it's crazy the breadth of what he was

Starting point is 00:45:33 able to cover but yeah he would go back to the tent and after a day of the most intense fighting in documented history he would then go and dictate a letter on the importance of building a local bridge in a rural municipality in france and then follow that up with a letter on the need for a girl's education academy because there really isn't one in this certain area of paris and then he'd go on to another one and dictate something about you know preparing his army for invasions in russia i mean it was just incredible how he's able to do this and i do think that that is what these agents allow us to do is multiply human agency. And that is the good timeline. The good timeline is that the best aspects of human greatness, achievement, and will and vitality

Starting point is 00:46:22 are multiplied. And I feel that happening when I use this. But I do think it is something to be really cognizant of how you're using the tools. Like if you're using it in this dictation sense where you are able when i'm using it um you know and dictating to it i can say so much more than i could possibly type because i can just talk forever all of us can yap um typing can be exhausting and um it's slow i type slower than i think yeah exactly so you actually like i feel like i lose some fidelity of my thoughts to commands when i write um now there are certainly many things that you have to really carefully phrase and write correctly and uh you know that is in publications and things like that that i do i think you should spend more time thinking

Starting point is 00:47:18 about exactly what you're saying phrasing it refining it like a sculpture or something um but for just raw output and ability to impact the world the dedication model is just incredible it's awesome yeah yeah so freaks when you take bitcoin seriously you start with custody you want to control your keys avoid single points of failure and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up that is what unchained has been focused on since 2016 unchained is the leader in collaborative multi-sig custody and bitcoin financial services that keep you in control they secure over 12 billion dollars in bitcoin for more than 12 000 clients that means about one out of every 200 bitcoin sits inside an unchained vault their model is simple you hold

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Starting point is 00:48:29 your bitcoin without giving up control go to unchained.com and use the code tftc10 at checkout to get 10 off your new bitcoin multisig volt that's tftc10 at unchained.com freaks look at me i'm glowing i've got like an angel's halo going around me you know why that is is i feel good i feel taken care of i feel blessed healthy happy and that is because i'm a crowd health member my family and i have been crowd health members for five years now literally this month five years ago, we joined CrowdHealth. We've had two babies. We've had multiple health events and we're never going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowdfunded healthcare. So you sign up for CrowdHealth, you pay a monthly fee, you help out with other people's bills. And it's significantly

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Starting point is 00:49:50 crowdhealth.com you'll get 99 a month for the first three months that you're on the crowd health platform in the community bitcoiners you found sovereign money now find sovereign health and sovereign health care what uh what's the rate of adoption of ai tools outside of bpi in the city is it big or is it i expected it would be a lot higher than it is um well i have i have this theory that like bitcoiners are just like early adopters to all this stuff this is what i was just thinking is like every time i talk to a bitcoiner about this stuff they have some crazy workflow because we just lean into new technology and i mean i've talked about this with like thorn and galaxy and skylar on the design stuff like every bitcoiner i know all these different places

Starting point is 00:50:34 in the industry or different types of jobs or skill sets like all of us have independently come up with crazy interesting ways to use this stuff uh when i talk to people at traditional think tanks like they're not this isn't even on their radar you know there's just like an institutional inertia for a lot of these more legacy institutions i think this is true you know zach shapiro our head of policy he's finding this at the law firm level you know he's um he's beating the drum i mean he's going out on the bpi policy hour i feel like has been like exactly like lawyers you better start vibe coding you better start using this well he wrote an article that went viral and then like he from that had so many attorneys reach out to him

Starting point is 00:51:17 that are you know at major law firms and they're just so frustrated i mean i dealt with this it was frustrating for me in 2022 2023 when i was working at a firm here in dc of just how hard it was to use any of the tools in the way that they're meant to be used and um that was when the tools weren't even that capable you know like we couldn't even access it on our laptop now they have some mediocre tools but it's all sort of like baked in stuff um like westlaw ai and stuff like that and zach has done a great job of just saying no you need to just integrate it top to bottom and you will be able to provide professional services at you know one tenth the cost and twice the quality and i think that has really surprised people at what he's been able

Starting point is 00:52:13 to pull off and then from that i've met lots of other it seems like what's happening is there's lots of senior associates or young partners that are breaking off from law firms and i'm sure this is happening in other fields too where they're realizing hey as a solo shop i can do what a team of 20 would do and do it a better quality and keep all the money and keep all the money yeah um so well this is cool to see i mean this dovetails into an important point that we definitely should discuss which is like policy around ai like as we're describing it is incredibly powerful and i think it's incredibly important to make sure that we're able to utilize these tools in the way that we know we can moving forward and so like policy around ai

Starting point is 00:53:04 whether it pertains to the models you can access uh and the energy debate around how those models are being trained and how the inference is being delivered uh is extremely important and it seems pretty chaotic right now it's very chaotic i constantly think about what we did with nuclear energy right we invented basically unlimited energy and then we banned it and built enough weapons to blow up the world many times over i mean we we basically did the absolute worst thing possible with that technology and i'm really really concerned we're going to do the same thing It took us, what, 50 years to get back to a semblance of sanity in nuclear policy? Yeah, and honestly, we're really far from it.

Starting point is 00:53:49 Like, the NRC has done an unbelievable amount of damage on the nuclear energy, on the nuclear industry. And what's so funny is if you go back and you actually read the announcement of the NRC, all the different major nuclear industry heads were like, this is a great new day for America. I can't wait for America to build out nuclear under this new leadership of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I mean, people were just like patting themselves on the back. The people in Congress were super happy with it. The industry loved it. And it killed all the progress.

Starting point is 00:54:21 It just became filled with people. Like if you listen to the guy who is the head of the NRC under Obama, he will openly get on stage and brag about how nuclear is the worst technology. We stopped it in every way we could. it's not going to save anyone um it's very funny so point being i'm really concerned that we're going to go to the same place with ai um the government just the nature of the institution struggles so hard with understanding exponentials or understanding um just reasoning about existential risk i feel like is this way to just like one shot the government

Starting point is 00:55:07 you know you have someone uh like in during covet lockdowns right you have uh someone like trump who in theory is pro-freedom pro-innovation pro-on you know small businesses etc they said okay there's a risk here that this could be some sort of major catastrophe we're just going to shut everything down indefinitely print a bunch of money print infinite money like they just can't reason about when someone says oh this is existential like just logic goes out the window we saw it with nuclear we saw it with the pandemic we saw it we're potentially seeing it now with ai i do think that the administ the current administration is somewhat inoculated to restricting ai but it is

Starting point is 00:55:59 we're still at the very early innings how many people have died from ai like we haven't had a major catastrophe i think that inevitably like any technology you know you invent ships there's gonna be shipwrecks you invent ai some people will use it as a tool for bad things or accidentally use it to cause some sort of harm um i guess my point is we are seeing pretty strong calls for heavy regulation of this technology before we've even seen any of those uh you know uh misuses or harms manifest we're on the other side on the positive side explore the full potential of it yeah or explore the full potential of it and so i'm just worried that um without someone explaining in clear terms the optimistic case for human flourishing

Starting point is 00:56:55 with ai how this is a complement to human agency greatness achievement um and all of the sort of knock-on benefits it can bring to individuals localities states that you're going to just you know go down a pretty dark path of you'll get surveilled closed permissioned ai fiefdoms um you know there there are people in the administration that defend open source but is that going to stand up over time if we have open source that's at the capability of fable or five times better than fable i really hope so it has to in my mind for for us to have a free society. But there's strange winds blowing in DC

Starting point is 00:57:43 and I feel like there's a lot more money coming in on the restrict side. What's whispering in these winds? Yeah, I mean, just one example. Trump's, one of Trump's like ground game lieutenants, her name is, it's escaping me now, I think it's Lisa Kramer. she used to she ran like the stop the steel grassroots campaign

Starting point is 00:58:08 for the 2020 election and the dispute over that she is now being funded by effective altruists oh gosh to run a new campaign called humans first which is like a maga aligned anti-AI. Populist anti-AI. Yeah, populist AI. So I will say that the doomers, the people that want to paint this pessimistic view

Starting point is 00:58:35 of AI, they are very, very savvy about how to play in the conversation. Well, the frontier model providers themselves. I mean, I think open AI is sort of backed away from it. It seems like Dario and Anthropic are leaning into it.

Starting point is 00:58:50 And one has to wonder, view their their marketing or how they're positioning things with a lens of skepticism because it's an easy way for them to get a regulatory mode which if you're following economic incentives is probably something they want at the end of the day it's really difficult to like actually figure out motives and that is what's difficult about all this you know i do think there are some people that genuinely think ai is dangerous paperclip problems and yeah we're going to get paper clipped um and that they are not doing this like yudkowsky is not seeking regulatory capture yudkowsky genuinely from the bottom of his heart wants to blow all this stuff

Starting point is 00:59:29 up um and for whatever reason has just been like one-shotted by these doomer scenarios um and then i think there's like there's just this whole spectrum of different people that are all it is a really strange set of bedfellows of people that are pushing in the same direction um you know you start to think through it you have foreign influence right strategic adversaries of course they want to undermine the use of the technology you have let's say radical environmentalists people that want to de-develop civilizations yeah malthusian um you have um economic populists that have legitimate concerns about job displacement and they're confused about where they're going to fit into all this you have people that are just uh your classic run-of-the-mill

Starting point is 01:00:18 socialist you know marxist type people that generally believe that all this should be redistributed um you have the national security hawks that think only the government should have access to technology and we need to restrict it to just a few bureaucrats um then you have like the effective altruist you have the incumbents uh that are playing for the frontier regulatory capture game like all of these people are angling in a similar direction sort of rowing in the same boat i don't even think they're working together but it is just this weird thing that we haven't really seen with any other typically you have like pretty strong set of voices on both sides this is sort of a weird place where people that in

Starting point is 01:01:06 no other scenario would it be sort of rowing in the same direction are all for one reason or another lining up and i'm genuinely i'm deeply concerned that our ability to use open source models or use these things uh in a way that maintains our privacy is compromised because of that you know um it was 2023 when dario was testifying in the senate that open source ai is headed down a very dangerous path it was three years ago um so i i just think at the end of the day it would be just terrible if we're the ones that are getting the short end of the stick again as a result of all of this um and that's why going back to the beginning of the conversation dc is going to be very very important for the next 10 years i mean my ability

Starting point is 01:02:03 predict what's going to happen is just so low i just it's all bets are off on on what's going to happen with the rate of progress but on the policy front there are dark or winds blowing in dc so i got a comment and then a follow-up yeah comment is uh comparing uh open ai strategy to anthropic is actually pretty funny because sam was just like you want five percent of the company we'll just give you we're not gonna we're not gonna fear monger we'll just give you five percent give us yeah we'll just cut you give us the moat cut you in yeah interesting strategy yeah yeah so that's the comment follow-up give the optimistic view i feel like a lot of the a lot of the conversation is focused on the pessimistic view and defending against that pessimistic view and

Starting point is 01:02:48 not enough is focused on what is the optimistic outcome what is the optimistic path what could potentially happen in the future that that many people will look back on and be like wow that was actually massively beneficial for me as an individual in society at large yeah i think that the optimistic view is a proliferation of this technology and our ability to achieve even greater heights of human achievement and what that looks like is broad it has so many different different ways that I see this going, whether it be for healthcare or education. But I do think that America has this incredible tradition of saying, we're going to experiment, we are going to embrace a new technology before everyone else, and we're going to do it in a way that preserves

Starting point is 01:03:40 freedom, preserves privacy, preserves autonomy. And what that looks like for AI is, again, choosing to lead the world and rising tide lifts all boats, I think that if it's done correctly, that the people that have been left out of the economy in rural America that have just been hit one thing after another with losing jobs overseas, just being left out, having brain drained to metropolitan areas, I think those people stand to benefit an incredible amount because of the benefits of energy production that we're going to, you know, we're going to need to build this stuff out and there will be economic benefits for those people. But I think really the upside in my mind is it does allow for an unprecedented amount of human agency.

Starting point is 01:04:33 And this is only if we have AI that is free in the sense of what advice it can give you. And is it going to genuinely be an extension of your will? Or is it going to restrict your ability to operate? So the Doomer case is we're going to surveil everything you say, everything you ask. And if you have a tough question, then we're going to tell you the party line. The optimistic scenario is we're going to give you an AI that is aligned with your interest, that wants you to maximize your human capability. and the the possibilities for our species i think are even like still underexplored um our education system is terrible absolutely terrible i went through a public education and i feel like i'm

Starting point is 01:05:25 probably 10 developed to what i could have come out of um like you look back to the education systems of like ancient rome and greece and the trivium and like how rigorous they are and how uh in you know the the people that came out of those i think that we can have access to like true great heights of civilization socrates being your teacher like yeah alexander the great yeah having having like you know i mean uh i think about this all the time but i think that each human has so much under cultivated uh capability for creation and i really see this as there is a distinction between consumption and creation and that the the bad path is that we are relegated to infinite consumers that we're going to be fed a algorithm that we have no access to

Starting point is 01:06:22 and it will provide endlessly stimulating entertainment for us to consume and that is a dark path the good path is we are all empowered to self-create in ways that is you know difficult to imagine but um each one of us has capable latent capabilities i think you know i took up just sort of as a side hobby i took up painting a couple years ago i got into art history i like this and then i started drawing and then i said drawing come on like the real skill is painting so i started doing painting started learning how to do like oil portraits and stuff um and the possibilities i mean this is just like what the internet can do is the internet can connect you with bob ross the best teachers in the world right like i was able to find a painting instructor

Starting point is 01:07:16 used to serve at the um academy in florence and i took online lessons from him he was fantastic steven bauman he's awesome i highly recommend um and then i think i need a connor brown original in my office yeah well i'm working maybe we can we can work on a side commission but um this is just like a microcosm right this was only possible because of the internet the ability to reduce the cost of incredible education now what does it look like when you multiply that to direct feedback from these agentic systems right that have the ability to provide customized feedback one of the best things for improving my painting abilities has been I'll get an hour-long call with a guy who is a fantastic painter and um he'll review my work from the past month provide some feedback

Starting point is 01:08:15 he'll draw on it and um that is that hour of my month is probably responsible for 70 percent of my mental improvement you know learning a skill is is partially just like learning the motor skills but it's mostly having an expert come correct you yeah and the mental heuristics like this thing you didn't even know you were doing wrong and you have an expert like oh looking over your shoulder like that do this don't do it that way like shift this way and boom yeah yeah pulls up you know uh photoshop and paints over it and says like oh your your value structure here is wrong like this area of the face is way too dark and you're not understanding that because the eye perceives like values in a near distance at a different you know uh level than than reality

Starting point is 01:09:03 and you have to like step back you know he'll give you like advice that is very simple but actually completely changes how you paint you know it's like well technically you're standing too close to the paintings you have to walk away eight feet take a couple seconds and then walk back and then you sort of can your eye like adjust yeah um all these sort of small things point being that's one hour a month and it's expensive and even then it's incredible to have that access this is just one way in which you know you can imagine a great ai teacher is available 24-7 to provide customized feedback and provide those insights constantly and so again you're unlocking these new heights of human achievement and creation and i think

Starting point is 01:09:47 what i struggle with and what everyone is struggling with is the algorithmic consumption complex that just gets you in the doom scroll forever and the optimistic view is you have agents that are acting in your own interest you have freedom on the technology you can select it for yourself and you can choose um to to use the technology in a way that sort of makes you the best version of yourself um that's just one example you know um i see this across every sector and also filling in just like more time to to self-cultivate like the great gentlemen scholars of yore you know they were able to do that because a lot of them had been gifted like massive estates and had people that uh freed up their time to pursue new creative endeavors and

Starting point is 01:10:41 academic endeavors and catalog every single insect that had ever been found in their local area like they were freed up with material wealth to do those really cool human endeavors to and uh i think that the the optimistic scenario is that we are going to see the same thing we can see the same thing and then we can come back to your war tent and go back to your war tent or eight to your scribes like here's what i learned out there here's what i want to work on yeah it's funny like i've taken up gardening um good for you i want to take up gardening it's uh i don't have i'm i'm in a pod dweller right now your pod well you gotta get out of the pond brother i was a pod dweller for a long time but it's good you like it i mean i'm just getting

Starting point is 01:11:22 like we we moved into this new house is a beautiful 112 year old property um so it's a nice stone old building pre good for you pre uh pre-federal reserve act so we've got a nice english garden in the background it's yeah we're the fifth family to ever live in this house and so like i feel a duty to the property to treat it well and so i'm beginning to understand the nature of the landscaping you're a steward yes we can all be stewards yes yes i'm a steward of the it is our house we own it but it is a property that yeah when our kids are up and they're out of the house maybe they'll buy it maybe there was one one family that bequeathed it to their their children so uh they got two generations in that house but who knows but for the time being

Starting point is 01:12:04 i'm gonna stay ahead of you this house is bigger than our family it's a it's a property that we have to steward is it a lot of upkeep because of its historic nature i mean it's it's strong good bones okay good bones yeah are you gonna get a physical clanker to walk around and help you i don't know and i imagine eventually yes i don't think the physical clankers are uh dexterous dexterous enough or uh i don't know i've seen some crazy hand demos yeah but like getting up the steps and all that i'm not sure if they're there yet oh they can get upset okay you think optimus can't get up steps right now i don't know i'm not sure yeah but do you want to buy the first iteration or you want to wait like two generations goes back to like i would never

Starting point is 01:12:45 in a million years have a closed source clanker in my house walking around going up my stairs yeah never yeah like i won't get a i won't get a room for that reason you know if i get to like run my own you know if i get to choose what software goes on there i might you get to build i might i would still be you can use the models to build the software to go on there yeah i mean i would still have i would still have some like really weird concerns about it just like the idea of having some robotic entity walking around my home but yeah i would certainly never do that if it was a closed source surveillance tool that is phoning home all the time to you know silicon valley um and the government and the government yeah yeah exactly exactly um

Starting point is 01:13:38 yeah it'd be like a hardware wallet or something right i want to know the firmware i want to like feel really good about what i'm using yeah so very important very important stuff and on a positive note we had uh we had an american made open weight model released this week yeah inkling very interesting have you used it not yet no yeah it just came out yesterday yeah yeah um i'm excited by that i hope that it keeps going in that direction you know it seems like every company starts off and they say oh we're the open source company we're open ai open source is at the core of what we do we're a non-profit we um we're going to you know then grok was open source they they released something early on and there was talk about this facebook fumbled it

Starting point is 01:14:31 you know yeah same thing facebook oh yeah open source that's really what what's going to be the future you have llama and now spark is closed source like i do hope that we have someone who is just willing to put the frontier open source and publish it um we'll see i don't i don't really know what to expect from the company it looks like it's like a little bit beyond behind the frontier so we we can't live in the world the world where china decides they're going to be the open source leader and all the american labs just sort of close up it seems insane to me oh my god such a such a strategic blunder for the us if we end up uh restricting open source and then the entire world just downloads china's open source uh weights you know like think of the strategic

Starting point is 01:15:25 benefit you can give a country if the entire world is building on your open source stack it is way deeper than oh it's not going to talk about tiananmen square okay that's that's not that's just kind of like you know a parlor trick or something what really is at stake is china creates a best-in-class open source model it's better than anyone else can put out it's cheaper and it somehow is really really good at programming for huawei ascend chips and terrible at using nvidia chips you know it's just like it makes these little tweaks that each one incrementally actually really helps china's strategic position and of course they would do that i mean the soft power you get of leading the world's open source models and having those just

Starting point is 01:16:13 be slightly better at doing things in your interest and slightly shittier doing things that are um you know against your interest huge huge um do you think anybody in the administration realizes this no i mean i don't we're we're still so early in the conversation but somebody clip it and send it to them yeah if someone could clip that send it um i would say send it to sax he's not there anymore send it to lutnik lutnik would be a good person primary sex partner craft you've been on this show get it to him get in his hands i'll text you bringing us back to bitcoin but combining the two i mean been a thesis within bitcoin for a while the abundant future that's going to be unleashed by by ai is going to make the need for a sound

Starting point is 01:17:02 digital distributed currency like bitcoin even stronger are you more or less convinced of that oh absolutely more convinced but it goes back to what type of systems are we going to be allowed to have or do we have right because i do think that capable open source systems that are trained in a neutral way are going to prefer bitcoin our research has shown that if you just query them as they get more capable they generally prefer this is across different models they prefer bitcoin and stable coins so i think that in a world where people aren't putting their thumb on the scale then the possibilities for bitcoin it's used in agentic commerce are just i i it's hard to even imagine because agents are going to have so many fewer barriers uh in using this as

Starting point is 01:17:56 everyday payment compared to humans you know they're digitally native bitcoin's digitally native it just is going to click for them you know nick zabo wrote about like the mental transaction costs and stuff they don't have any of that stuff so it's going to be huge for them um and i think will be naturally adopted because how much bitcoin content is in their training set like every rip you've ever recorded is somewhere in uh you know the the training sets of the frontier models like uh gpt3 one of the tokens was gmax from gregory maxwell he was actually one of the gpt3 tokens that's insane um and there was only like a small number of tokens i forget they only had like 20 000 unique tokens or something so like bitcoiners are prolific in our content output

Starting point is 01:18:42 our arguments are right and are good and are consistent and appeal to machines you know it is a tech forward approach so if we have open permissionless free ai then i think that the implications for bitcoin and its adoption are massive um but if we have a dystopian scenario where all we have are surveilled and controlled ai fiefdoms then it would not surprise me at all if the players start putting their thumb on the scale i almost i almost uh hesitated in releasing our ai research about how agents prefer bitcoin because i know that many of the people in the frontier labs are you know socialist leaning or sort of anti-libertarian leaning and one of them has his own coin i would i was yeah yeah exactly i was worried that just by releasing that

Starting point is 01:19:49 they might be like oh we need to like alter the training set because claude likes bitcoin we can't have that going on um but i i think that like ultimately open source software will provide the counterweight and will be sort of the mechanism that bitcoin is uptaken by these agents so but if if we are sort of in this like fiefdom end game which is easier to happen than people want to admit i think then they easily could say um great so as part of our frontier testing for releasing a new model the public it has to really like cbdc's or these preferred stable coins or these preferred stable coins um you know running on the x402 protocol yeah that's what you prefer yeah exactly so that's kind of where my mind is at is we're gonna have to make sure we get that

Starting point is 01:20:45 scenario well i think we could keep going for hours but i know you have to get somewhere i'm gonna be back down here a lot we'll do this more frequently yeah i'm looking forward to it we're gonna have plenty to talk about so yes we are 10 years 10 years of very important things happening in the city yeah all right peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a

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TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #773: Open Source AI Is Non-Negotiable with Conner Brown

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