The Breakdown - OpenAI Digs A Moat, Ethereum Foundation Loses Talent, And Polymarket’s UMA Problem | The Breakdown

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

David unpacks the Ethereum Foundation exits, the Polymarket / UMA Oracle dispute mess revealed by the WSJ, and OpenAI's push to sell guaranteed compute on 1–3 year commits. Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS: (0...0:00) Intro (01:23) ETH Foundation Departures (17:00) Polymarket Dispute Judges (27:11) OpenAI Guaranteed Compute FOLLOW THE SHOW › David — https://x.com/dcanellis › The Breakdown — https://x.com/TheBreakdownBW SPONSORS Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to the Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ DISCLAIMER As always, remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, May the 20th. This is The Breakdown. I'm your host, David Canellis, as always. Today, we're going to jump into some stories to get you ready for the midweek ahead. We're looking at about half a dozen exits from the Ethereum Foundation. What's going on with that? Why is everybody leaving the EF? What does it have to do with the new mandate?
Starting point is 00:00:20 We're going to find out. We're also looking at a Wall Street Journal article about Pollymarket. I brought up the Uma Oracle and decision. making processes around disputes last week. And then, lo and behold, we have some reporting from the Wall Street Journal about how that operates and who exactly is making these dispute decisions. We're also going to be looking at Open AI, opening up a stream to guarantee compute for between one and three-year commits. Sam Altman says it is because customers are increasingly asking for certainty on capacity. And Sam Altman expects that the world will be capacity constrained for
Starting point is 00:00:59 some time. We're going to be looking at how that works and why. So without further ado, this is the breakdown. Let's get to it. Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and interviews expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Okay. First, we're going to launch into this Ethereum Foundation stuff because, yeah, I just said it was half a dozen. It's actually eight Ethereum Foundation researchers have quit so far this year. year. And this is a piece from Femex. I apologize if some of this has been lifted from
Starting point is 00:01:40 other articles without citation and so on. And there's been a few different write-ups as well. But what I liked about this particular write-up is we have a nice table here that breaks down each of the levers and their roles within the Ethereum Foundation. And I also apologize if I butcher some of these names. But I'm going to rattle them off. Carl Beatt who had been there for seven years working on consensus layer research in the beaten chain and and and throughout the transition to proof of state. He's out Julian Ma, who was there for about four years. He was into crypto economics and mechanism design. He's gone. Barnaby Mono, proposed a builder separation, validated economics and EPBS research. He's gone. He was there for multiple years. Tim Biko is also out.
Starting point is 00:02:30 he was the public facing protocol coordinator. He ran the all called Devs calls. He's gone too. He was there for multiple years. Trent Van Epp, he was also an ecosystem coordination and played a central role organizing the Protocol Guild.
Starting point is 00:02:44 He left earlier this year. Alex Stokes, Josh, who was the operation leads, he's gone. He was there for seven years. He wrote an annual essay series, Adams Institutions and Blockchains. And also Tomaz Stanzak. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly,
Starting point is 00:02:59 or at least closer correctly. He was there for less than a year and he was the former co-executive director and ex-Nethermind CEO. So big talent shifts at the Ethereum Foundation. And it wouldn't be surprised if we saw more. Every other day we're seeing LinkedIn-style vague posting on the timeline
Starting point is 00:03:21 from Ethereum Foundation folk who are taking the moment to recalibrate to go and touch grass while they look for their next opportunity. So the Fembex piece does give a little bit of context here. Vitalik had repositioned the Ethereum Foundation away from top-down roadmap ownership and towards a focused research and grants hub, which does make sense.
Starting point is 00:03:44 They've essentially, and I have it here, and this is, of course, a flow-on effect from the Ethereum Foundation's epic post from earlier this year in March, introducing a new Ethereum Foundation mandate, or at least a reinforcement of the Ethereum Foundation's original mission statement to kind of reapply it to the 2026 mindset and the 26 Cryptozygeist. They described it as a document that serves as part constitution, part manifesto, and part guide for the Ethereum Foundation.
Starting point is 00:04:19 The mandate itself is quite long. I've got it up here on screen. It's 38 pages long. And describing it as a manifesto is indeed apt. And so we might have some clues as to why long-term Ethereum Foundation employees are moving on to at least different things. I won't say better things, but different things. The mandate states the foundation is not the parent, owner or ruler of Ethereum. We are not the system itself.
Starting point is 00:04:46 The foundation exists to ensure Ethereum becomes and stays a decentralized and resilient civilization. The foundation exists to ensure Ethereum becomes and stays a decentralized and resilient civilization or foundational foundational, infrastructure, part of the bedrock in which the broader self-sovereignty can be built alongside other requirements like clean air, water, energy, freedom of communication and access to knowledge. It goes on that our ultimate goal is for Ethereum to pass the walkaway test. Its protocol and core application layers become robust and trustless enough that they would continue to reliably function and evolve even if the foundation and today's core developers disappeared tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:05:26 and obviously some of those research, at least researchers and other critical members of the Ethereum Foundation, where at least I'll say people filling the critical roles in the Ethereum Foundation are indeed disappearing seemingly by the day. As bad as that sounds, I will just note that the Ethereum Foundation does have quite a lot of employees. I believe it has around 300 employees. In that case, if you have a 300 employee strong organization, and eight or ten of those decide to leave, it is quite a small turnover.
Starting point is 00:06:03 And many of these employees have been at the foundation for quite a long time, which is quite commendable when you think of how big and manic the crypto cycles can be. If you've been at the Ethereum Foundation for eight years, you would have seen the 2018 bull run. You would have seen the 2021 bull run.
Starting point is 00:06:23 And then the 2024 into 2025 ball run. That's three bull cycles, three bear cycles that you would have witnessed. You would have seen the birth of more centralized chains, chains that are pushing speed rather than decentralization and throwing all sorts of money and personnel at business development in order to bring about more usage and service a part of the market that perhaps Ethereum is not exactly hell-bent on servicing right now. You would have seen all that.
Starting point is 00:06:56 seen people get rich from buying and holding tokens. You would have seen people get rich from jumping ship to the next hot protocol and taking a big fact salary moving on to the next one or two years. In all of that time, some of these people at the Ethereum Foundation have been there earning, I won't say earning nothing, but earning less than what many other people make into crypto space. And this is not a new discussion. I know this came up when Ethereum folk got in trouble from the masses for taking on roles at protocols like eigenlayer and stuff like that. At the same time when they should be in the eyes of the community, be working solely on Ethereum from now until eternity until they're 80 years old,
Starting point is 00:07:44 or else they are not convicted. They are not committed to the Ethereum cause. So on one hand, it's understandable. You do have to move on sometime. I wouldn't say that the Ethereum, Foundation is over because these people are leaving or Ethereum is over because they are leaving. But it does make a certain amount of sense that if the Ethereum Foundation is going leaner, morphing more into a grants-oriented organization rather than biz dev and so on, it does make
Starting point is 00:08:14 sense that perhaps people who would be interested in taking on roles of that nature within the crypto space, they might look for somewhere else to do that. And it's not like, I mean, I completely understand that probably 95 to 98% of Ethereum's branding in general, or at least as perception within the crypto space, within the institutional spaces, is that it a neutral base layer that is decentralized and also upholds the cyphapunk values of self-sovereignty in all things. at least prioritizing that over a desire to maximize throughput at the cost of decentralization. But it is not like the Ethereum ecosystem does not have companies, massive companies, working on biz dev and so on all the time. We of course have consensus, which private company. We also have Sharplink, which is out there being a digital asset treasury business.
Starting point is 00:09:21 We also have Sharplink. Ethereum's primary digital asset treasury business, as well as some other similar ventures within the Ethereum space. So it is not like Ethereum is this only cyphapunk thing that doesn't care about business development or increasing adoption or increasing the number of companies wanting to work within the Ethereum space. There's plenty of people and companies and ventures out there going and doing that. So it makes sense that the Ethereum Foundation also does not have to do that as well. And there seems to be like this perception out there that Ethereum is dying because we do
Starting point is 00:10:07 have more energized protocol teams outside of the Ethereum context that are really pushing BizDep, that are really pushing to boost adoption through increased throughput. and moving faster and breaking more things than perhaps Ethereum is willing to do. But I don't really see that in the data. I'm going to bring up the Blockworth Research Platform as usual. And I was looking at this this morning because I was curious about network revenues for blockchains and how Ethereum is evolving in this era of hyperliquid. All anyone ever wants to talk about is hyperliquid.
Starting point is 00:10:48 Everyone's watching pre-stocks. Everyone's watching real world assets trade on chain, oil perps. And watching perp volumes just explode. Tokenized stock volumes explode. And for the most part, that stuff is not really happening on Ethereum. It is happening on hyperliquid to lesser extent it's happening on Solana. But here I've pulled up the weekly network revenue for blockchains. And one cool thing, I will say it.
Starting point is 00:11:18 There was a tweet floating around Twitter. earlier this week, or perhaps late last week, that showed that network revenue, at least for layer one chains, has never been this diversified. And you can see that on my screen, because for the longest time, Ethereum was making most of the blockchain revenue, especially like going from 2020, 2021, this is all the NFT bull market. So it's understandable that Ethereum was really dominating that. There was also a lot of meme coins all on Ethereum. And so, So we're going through 2022. Ethereum is about two-thirds of all network revenue.
Starting point is 00:11:55 And going into mid-2020, we really started to see that diverge. And that was the massive rally for Solana and massive explosion in Solana activity. And then from there, we had Hyperliquid. So now we're at June 2025, mid-last year. Hyperliquid is making 27% of all network revenue within the context of the L1 space. then it was Solana, 22%, Tron was 21%, and Ethereum was only 15%. One would expect if Ethereum really is falling behind adoption, widespread adoption, in comparison to the faster, arguably cheaper chains.
Starting point is 00:12:37 We should see the Ethereum share of network revenue continued to decrease over the past year, but it's just not the case. If we look at the latest numbers, only in May, so last week, mid-May, hyperlegal is still number 1, 28%, Tron is 24%, and Ethereum is still number 3, with 16%. And that is actually higher than what it was in January. In January, Ethereum was only bringing in 11% of all or network revenue. So it is not like Ethereum's market share, we'll call it market share using network revenue as a proxy.
Starting point is 00:13:13 It's not like it is dropping. Ethereum is doing as much as it has ever done, at least over the past. year or two, which I suppose that has to say something to, one, the decentralization of the Ethereum ecosystem that whatever the Ethereum Foundation is doing, perhaps it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things when we look at this kind of metric. It also says that there is a serious market here for whatever Ethereum is and is aiming to be over the next three to five years. So at this point in time, it is almost like it's okay to have a favorite. It's okay.
Starting point is 00:13:57 But the crypto market is incredibly diversified, at least compared to three years ago. So this idea of like Ethereum supremacy, Bitcoin supremacy, Solana supremacy, it doesn't really make much sense anymore. What does make sense is understanding that there are different use cases and desires for what you want out of chain networks. And it takes a digging in of your heels in the sand if you are a salana, if you are an Ethereum, if you are a Tron. You have to dig in and diversify your value proposition
Starting point is 00:14:35 with at least the other chains within the top 10, top 20. And what's curious too is how token prices have held up amongst all of this. and to the more Bitcoin-minded folks in the audience, perhaps you'll like the look of this screen here. I have the ETH-BTC ratio up on my screen and you can see that Ethereum is worth less right now against Bitcoin than it was at the start of the year. Those prices have actually declined about 19% over the year to date.
Starting point is 00:15:12 So you've been better off holding Bitcoin throughout the 2026 bearish moves than Ethereum, let's say that. But if we switch over to the sole eth chart, so the sole eth ratio, you can see a similar effect that it would have been better to hold Ethereum rather than Solana over the year to date with the sole eth ratio dropping by about 40% over the past year and about 5% over the year to date. So I think people like to have this idea that, I would call it the hyper-liquid effect,
Starting point is 00:15:52 that fast chains, ready-to-service speculative markets, and that is the primary utility. I mean, hype is absolutely bullish. It's around all-time highs right now. Please don't get me wrong. But it's not like that, that is, everywhere across the crypto market. There is clearly room and demand for different kinds of specialization. And to me, that makes for a healthy crypto market. So changing of the guard
Starting point is 00:16:23 of the Ethereum Foundation, I would say probably a good thing. And I think we need to get out of this thinking that if you were a bitcoiner in 2015, you need to be a bitcoiner in 2040. or you were an Ethereum Foundation employee. You need to stay there for your entire career or else you never believed in Ethereum in the first place and you have lost your hope for the second biggest chain in the crypto space. I just don't buy it.
Starting point is 00:16:53 But in any case, good luck to the Ethereum Foundation folks on whatever they plan to do next. Speaking of, what do we have next? So let's chat about the polymarket resolution process. This was a piece from, I want to say Monday, perhaps Sunday, May the 17th, from Sam Kessler, alongside Alexander Ozypovich. Sam Kessler, of course, former Coin desk reporter, now at the Wall Street Journal. They've detailed, done a little bit of legwork, trying to identify the Uma Wales responsible for settling polymarket disputes. And, I mean, I brought this up.
Starting point is 00:17:30 I brought this up last week, perhaps the week before. that there is room for a decentralized, or at least another decentralized prediction market to make serious ground against both Kaushi and Polly Market if they can nail an appropriate dispute resolution process that is indeed decentralized and operates as people believe it should. I'll leave it to you to read the full article, because they did do some legwork in here, But essentially it details a few different instances over the past few months, six months to a year where outcomes of markets have been contested.
Starting point is 00:18:13 And this is particularly interesting because polymarket volume is really exploding. And we're going into the next election season where Polymarket has historically seen huge volume. You know, what election seasons are to Polymarket are what massive tech and AI IPO. are to Iper liquid white right now in terms of a real aha moment for for the wider public in terms of the utility of these markets. The details of the piece, I'm just going to run through through a couple of them. This is at least according to the Wall Street Journal analyst and analysis and I haven't vetted this myself. But first, so just to give you a little bit of context, Polymarket itself does not actually decide many of the disputed outcomes. What usually
Starting point is 00:19:02 happens if there is a dispute over what the outcome should be for a market, that gets handed off to token holders of Uma. It's the Uma Oracle situation where it's basically a dispute system where holders of Uma, they awarded the power to vote how a dispute should be settled. And it's a way of polymarket just decentralising this process. So it's not just polymarket deciding which is correct and which is not when it comes to certain things. An example they give was that Israel and Hezbollah would not reach a ceasefire. They had a polymarket for that. When Israel reached a truce with Lebanon, traders argued whether that counted as a Hezbollah ceasefire. And so these things are quite messy. And so you need interested parties who are meant to not be financially motivated.
Starting point is 00:19:57 They're not meant to have exposure in the market they're trying to dispute. One would think, but the Wall Street Journal found that over the past year, at least 60% of active UMA voters could be linked to polymarket accounts, and in more than 300 disputes, at least one uma voter had money riding on the outcome that they were voting on. So you have an Oracle system that has people who are financially exposed to the decisions that they are tasked with making, which is a little bit weird to me. It's a little bit messy. It is meant to be a decentralized oracle system, but the voting power is concentrated. In most disputes, the Wall Street Journal found more than 50% of votes came from the 10 largest
Starting point is 00:20:44 wallets, which, okay, so you do have a very small number of people resolving these disputes. Some of them might have polymarket accounts, and some of them might be involved in the markets that they are deciding for, which is quite interesting. They do have some comment here in the piece. A company spokesperson said that only 0.2% of polymarket contracts trigger an OMA vote. So a very small number of contracts required dispute resolution through the Euma Oracle. And we do have Shane Copland, Polymarket founder. He acknowledges that the dispute process is messy.
Starting point is 00:21:25 He did so in March at least. And he is teased for quite some time that improvements are coming. It wouldn't surprise me if they ditched. Uma Oracle outright. But I still would like, and I'm sure many people would like, that a dispute resolution that is one decentralized and one robust enough, that it doesn't simply rely on the reporting of a journalist. Because this positioning of polymarket and prediction markets as a way to know the truth about certain things without having to rely on news media, That, of course, comes completely into question when dispute resolutions rely on reporting of the news media in order to know what is right and what is wrong.
Starting point is 00:22:12 So, again, there's some logical fallacies in the way that the value proposition of prediction markets is communicated to the public. And of course, this is quite difficult to do, because we all know marketing in itself is always not exactly closely aligned with reality is more directionally correct. and as long as it is effective and hits the masses, then I suppose that's all that matters in many cases. But I digress. A spokesperson for risk labs who issues the UMA token, they says that there's no credible evidence of UMA manipulation of markets and basically made the case that any complaints about the UMA resolution process
Starting point is 00:22:55 is coming from traders who lost money who made the wrong bets and really wanted to go another way. Another interesting tidbit here is that so far this year, we're now in May, so we're not even halfway through the year, just shy of halfway through. More than 1,150 polymarket bets have treated disputes, which is already more than all of last year. So as volume activity increases on the platform, and probably as more markets are playing out on the platform too, we are seeing an increase in disputes.
Starting point is 00:23:27 So this needs to be solved very quickly, I would say, especially as we head into the election season, as I said earlier. I will just take devil's advocate because there is, I mean, there's some other details in the piece. It's really worth reading yourself. But they did talk to a committee member of something called Uma Rocks, which was a startup that pulls Uber votes and delegates them to a committee as a way of perhaps making the dispute resolution process a little bit,
Starting point is 00:23:57 more focused. At least it would be the idea. That committee member known as Scout, he admitted he often bet on disputed polymarkets while voting on those same disputes. But he argued that conflicted traders may actually research outcomes more seriously than uninvolved voters. So this idea that you want a polymarket dispute judge to actually have skin in the game because then they will really get to the bottom of what actually happened, which I'm not sure if I totally buy. It definitely, it makes somewhat sense on paper that that is how the logic would go. But it is very reliant on that individual's own emotions and feelings in the moment. And I would also dare to say their own financial health in the moment.
Starting point is 00:24:51 Obviously, this is going to come to a head, especially if the Wall Street Journal is doing this digging and running a story like this. We know that prediction markets are facing some regulation. We had Minnesota come out and outright ban prediction markets, which seems to be the first state in the US to outright try to ban prediction markets altogether. And now we have the CFTC suing the state of Minnesota claiming that only it has jurisdiction and oversight to make those kinds of regulatory calls. And of course, Polymarket is. And of course, Polymarket is. not the only prediction market. There's many others. Obviously, Kaushi has a dispute system, but they just do it themselves. And there's been instances where Polymarket has overridden
Starting point is 00:25:34 the UMA Oracle dispute calls as well. So obviously this is going to come to a head. What I don't want to happen is that Polymarket just centralizes and decides it's to settle disputes all by itself. Because at that point, I am not too sure what is meant to be decentralized about polymarket at all. What I think will happen is that we are headed, and I know that there are a number of projects already doing this, but we are headed towards a world where we have more decentralized prediction markets to the point that they are user-created markets. There's obviously there's massive challenges with figuring out how to enable liquidity
Starting point is 00:26:17 and deep enough liquidity that the markets are realistic in terms of what they are representing for the predictions of the market themselves. If you have unlimited, infinite user generated markets, then how are they being funded? What are the order books look like? How easy it is to game those predictions. Obviously, that is something that still needs to be addressed and very difficult to work out because at this point prediction markets, there is much, there's much distribution. A lot of the motive of prediction. markets are their distribution and and the user adoption. So TBD on how this plays out, but obviously this is coming to a head. And I am very interested into what Polymarket is looking to do in
Starting point is 00:27:06 terms of reconfiguring how disputes are settled. So on to the next one. Okay, so OpenAI seems have jumped first and they have launched a stream to guarantee compute for companies who are really looking at their token budgets and also the standard of the compute that they are receiving because we know that models are basically compute is the model neck power is the bottleneck
Starting point is 00:27:31 power is the bottleneck and so the quality of the compute really matters a lot especially over the long term if you're looking to really automate a lot of your systems and really like replace your human workers with token munches you're going to need to have a
Starting point is 00:27:47 standardize level of service from these AI providers. And that's essentially how they're framing the blog post. Open AI, this is from this morning. Stale with capacity you can be certain about. The next generation of AI products will be built by organizations that can move quickly, scale confidently, and bring intelligence into their most important workflows without worrying whether infrastructure can keep up. They said that they've made long-term investments in infrastructure partnerships and capacity,
Starting point is 00:28:16 planning to help customers scale compute as demand grows. So they're now offering guaranteed capacity. A new way to help customers have certainty of access to compute for their most important products, agents and customer workflows. And they can choose between one and three year commitments with discounts that increase based on annual commitment. So that is quite interesting. Guaranteed capacity includes certainty of access to compute based on spend levels
Starting point is 00:28:40 and customers can draw down from this commitment across the portfolio of OpenAI products. And I mean, how Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of OpenAI, he's really pushed on this discounted tokens thing. He says on Twitter, we are now offering discounted tokens and certainty on capacity availability in exchange for one to three-year commits. I have to say this is quite interesting. And obviously, this is, I mean, there's many different reasons for this,
Starting point is 00:29:05 obviously. A big one of it would be the essentially the constant back and forth of people moving from Anthropic to maybe Gemini to, to then open AI and then as soon as one of them releases a new model that might do something a little bit better than the other, then they all switch. So there's no, there's this idea of like legitimate moat in AI. I'm not sure it is exactly real, especially when it really takes the release of a new model that is marginally better, you might say, or perhaps it's only 10 or 15%, perhaps it's 10 or 15%
Starting point is 00:29:41 more efficient at certain tasks than another. you will see a mass exodus of people. It'll take about a week for people to switch over. So for one, Garen't locking in discounted tokens and guaranteed compute for three years is an excellent way of, I suppose, making sure that you retain your customers for at least as long as possible,
Starting point is 00:30:02 or at least as long as is believable. We'll say that. And I suppose, like, we should highlight what the skeptics is saying, Ed Zetron, who is one of the dark horsemen of AI skeptics along with someone like Gary Marcus, I suppose. Ed Zittron is convinced that this is a numbers game. They're doing the thing that Anthropic is doing where they count revenue paid up front
Starting point is 00:30:23 as part of annualized revenue. Give them a few weeks and suddenly Open AI will be at $45 billion in annualized revenue, he says. Which I suppose is, could be the case. But I think that that is just playing the game. I wouldn't necessarily fault Open AI for doing that. But what I will say, I just want to draw your attention to this clip from the All In podcast a few days ago when Mark Benahoff of Sales Force was discussing this idea of really locking into one particular compute operator.
Starting point is 00:31:01 I'm just going to play the clip. Okay, so I think that's a mistake to think that way. See, I think we are wasting a lot of this token. Oh, for sure. Here's my guy. I think I convince you this. So here's a, here we're using $300 million of Anthropic this year and we're coding, we're coding, we're coding, we're coding, right? The vast majority of those tokens don't need to go to Anthropic.
Starting point is 00:31:20 There needs to be some intermediary layer that's saying, oh, that one has to go to Anthropic, but these quons can handle by a smaller model. You need a my show that can route it to the most affordable for the job. No, we're like in such an early moment. You know, it's an early moment. And I want to connect back to what you said before, which was brilliant, Jason, which was, the importance of the edge because the edge and the cloud are going to come together, okay? And yes, you're going to have more distributed intelligence.
Starting point is 00:31:50 It's going to work together. That's going to make a ton of sense what you said. What Chama said was also completely right. You were both right. Then you combine it to this idea. Let's put it together where we're going. Yes, we're going to have more distributed intelligence. We're going to have intelligence on the edge.
Starting point is 00:32:05 We're going to have multi-sensory models. And yes, you're going to do coding. And it's going to be more efficient, though. So to think that it's going to be always so expensive, that is just the moment of time that we're at right now. And I think there's going to be a hot new company that's going to come along and say this. I'm going to sit between you, Anthropic, and Open AI. And I'm going to make sure that you only need their tokens when you actually need them. And that is not really where we are right now.
Starting point is 00:32:35 Does that make sense what I'm saying? Totally. You're like, it's like, oh, I need a shower. him. Okay, great. All the water. No, no, no. I just need some water. I don't need all of the water. Yeah. So now that OpenAI is pushing for guaranteed compute, I wonder the viability of a platform that the mark is, is, is, is hypothesizing here. Especially if you see Anthropic do the same thing. It wouldn't surprise me. Anthropic comes out with a with a very similar program, slightly different name of a way of offering discounted tokens as long as you buy them in, batches for over three years or so. So I'm very curious how this is going to play out.
Starting point is 00:33:17 If what Mark says is true that compute is going to become cheaper over time, then it would have to be quite a discount that Open AI or Anthropic would offer to lock in those tokens over time, especially if they were going to see value or price volatility for the tokens that you're buying and the quality of compute that you receive, it will be necessary to standardize compute, which I don't really know if it is totally realistic because we're supposed to believe that AI is going to become even more powerful and more efficient over time.
Starting point is 00:33:48 So it's very difficult to then standardize the level of compute you're going to receive for the tokens that you buy. But I would say that this is, it's an interesting development. I would say that also there is something else happening beneath the scenes that would dictate a need to see. sell and lock in users for between one and three years on one particular platform. We obviously know that there's a lot of stories out there right now that actually humans are cheaper than AI due to the sheer cost of the tokens.
Starting point is 00:34:20 And we have this kind of mania over how many tokens you can spend. It was the open clawed guy spending a million dollars in a day on tokens or some nonsense like that. So perhaps this is a reaction to that kind of atmosphere that, yeah, tokens are really expensive and you do need to use these AI platforms if you are going to stay ahead as an organization but obviously we are moving into a new era of compute and tokens where things are a little bit more standardized as long as you lock into one particular platform for an extended period of time so an interesting development in the AI space to pair with some of the other
Starting point is 00:35:00 stuff happening across crypto today so that about covers it for today I hope you enjoy and please hit like and subscribe on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, wherever you are, wherever you're tuning in from. It helps us out a lot. And if you have anything to request from me, something to talk about on the show, please reach out to me on Twitter at DeCanellis or via email David at blockworks.com. I read all your messages. I read all your comments.
Starting point is 00:35:33 In any case, I think that's about enough. please take care of yourselves and we'll see you next time. Goodbye.

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