WT3 Podcast’s Post

Transcript

Liam: There's AI, and then there's really bad generative AI. Charlie: When I was involved in 2017, 2018, I think Web3 failed. Thomas: We did AI before it was cool. And it's still, that's still the uncool side of AI, right? Liam: Thinking about the concept of Web3 so, and i'd love to just get your guys take on this as well before we finally wrap up is when people say web3 what they mean is it's the next version after Web2. Well Web2 was interactive and social media websites, Web1 was just the World Wide Web. Everything was pretty much static apart from maybe some marquee text in html, it was all tables and frames. We then got dynamic and we got mobile with Web 2. Web3 is the next evolution. And I think it was Gavin Wood that actually coined it as being for blockchain with Web3 and he basically, he took hold of it and said, okay, well, blockchain is now Web3. So Ethereum Solana, Cardano, all of these things are Web3. I do not believe that Bitcoin is part of Web3 and we can talk about that in probably an After Dark episode (Tuesdays on X) my view on the difference between Bitcoin, Crypto and Web3 is definitely something we can debate about but Web3 was taken up by blockchain. We're getting some adoption in blockchain online and logging in with wallets and stuff but I would say we're getting less adoption than we are for AI and AI is changing the way the internet moves very very quickly. Whether you're thinking about it from the point of view of the content trash heap to a degree, I dunno if you've seen any of these posts on Reddit, but the amount of like now research papers that have just been written by GPT. Yeah. Like you just search for, I'm sorry, as an AI in Google Scholar and it comes up with lists of stuff. You've got images, you go on YouTube shorts now, half of them are just AI generated garbage. There's AI. And then there's really bad generative AI, but regardless of whether you like it or not, AI has been integrated into every part of the internet. I think it's actually a very good case to say that tokenization of the internet, which essentially is what blockchain and Web3 is kind of thought of now will be more likely Web4 and be something to be built on top of a new AI layer and that Web3 should maybe actually be reserved for AI. There's no right or wrong answer here. It's, it's a kind of an open ended question. Charlie: Being involved from when I was involved in 2017, 2018, I think Web3 failed. Thomas: I don't think it existed, it existed at that point, right? Charlie: Well, it was when ICOs and things like that were coming out. Thomas: Yeah, was, was the Web3 term then already there? I think we were still like just in the blockchain industry. At least that's how I always perceived it as a builder. Charlie: It evolved from there, to rephrase then when I was working in it and we were calling it Web3, which was 2017, 2018. Liam: You're right. Charlie: We were releasing ICOs. The whole concept, like the vision of the industry was things were going to be decentralized identity, money, all of like the whole point of it was that we were going to decentralize away control of the financial sector away from governments that didn't really care about us, as individuals. We would regain agency over our funds and how we were going to make that work. I think the reason why I say, I think Web3 failed is 70 something percentage, 73 ish percent of blockchain projects are on Amazon, Amazon hosting services. Liam: The front ends are. Thomas: There are nodes sometimes, too. Charlie: Yeah. If Amazon were to turn off, the decentralized dream would turn off with it, regardless of the percentage. And that is just fundamentally against what we were working on in 2017, 2018. I agree with your, your perception on AI. And I actually think AI is the more usable, more interesting. It's gathered more velocity than I can make some money in Crypto in, in the circles I run. And it's, it's more practical. There's still a lot of complexity around blockchain that a lot of people don't understand, I barely understand, that is a barrier to entry, whereas AI is kind of, I'm talking to, you know, the end user, they can, they should okay, I get what this does. I can conceptually understand it. Liam: So I want to say that I think you make a really good point there, which kind of backs up my view of kind of blockchain needs to kind of leapfrog AI a little bit in terminology, but I don't know whether we can reclaim the vernacular now. But the reason why I say that is I've just done a Twitter space today with the guys from the internet computer, ICP. And you also look at what are we doing now with their virtualization and stuff. I think the, decentralized computing and decentralized cloud is really starting to find its feet, but it's kind of, it's now behind AI in that thing. So I think it does really so fit of tokenization of things kind of needs to be Web4, but I think we're kind of stuck with it now. Thomas: Yeah. I mean, when you talk about tokenization, like I remember. We already tokenized data back in the day when we worked at AWS, right? You need to buy tokens to view data. So there was some, some tokenization going on. That's always I don't know, an engineer told me that a while ago, like shit, man, that's... Liam: Yeah, it wasn't tokenized on a decentralized blockchain. Thomas: No, it wasn't. No. And so I, maybe I have a couple of spicy takes on, on both AI and blockchain because I'm long enough in the space probably to be a DGEN and I love it, but I'm also very skeptical, right? Like I said earlier, do you really need a blockchain? 90 percent of the times we've asked that question to agencies of two projects, they don't, right? Like they want it because it's cool, it's hip, but they don't really understand it. And then secondly, sometimes you need blockchain, but you don't need crypto. Hyperledger is a great, great, you know, great solution for a lot of issues, enterprise issues that I think solve a lot of good things. So for me, it'e, and then secondly, do you need decentralized blockchain? Like a lot of solutions you need immutable, right? You need transparency. Do you need decentralized? I don't know, does your average SaaS platform need decentralized data? Do they really want to give up that data? Because that's also, I always love that discussion around decentralized social media. And don't get me wrong here. I really love the perspective of Web3 and being decentralized, right? Like just, well, let's say decentralization of your data. Practically, if you look at what a Facebook does or what an X does, what is their biggest stack? It's data, right? Everybody's "yeah, yeah, but if we get big enough, then, you know, Facebook has no choice than to use decentralized data." I doubt it. Like we're talking about 2 billion and some change users like they're not gonna switch because you're talking about like your data. Nobody cares. And that's the problem of what we've seen in blockchain for a long time. We're focusing very heavily on technology. Everybody's always oh, I did this really cool thing and it's powered by blockchain. I always said, does my mom care? No. Does my dad care? No. Does my sister care, who is 10 years older than me? Liam: Yeah, but when, when Facebook collapses, just like MySpace did, and you lose all of your data and access to everything, you'll be wishing you were using Lens. Thomas: I fully, I fully agree, but I'd argue that even if that, breaks down and collapse, and I, I surely hope so, together with all the other big, social media companies. Liam: On a long enough timeframe, it will. Thomas: Oh no, it will. Liam: Everything fails eventually. Thomas: People will keep there needs to be a move, but I think the movement of decentralization is a lot. Takes a lot longer time than what people think, I feel, and I did some sketch, oh no, it's like 5 to 10 years, I'm no, it's, I think it's close to 20 to 40, because it's a really long, you're talking about data, it's like oil, it's it's asking Saudi Arabia, it's oh yeah, we're switching to electric right now, Saudi Arabia will say, yeah, well, it's great, but we're still selling oil, we're not gonna just throwing our oil away, right? Like there's a lot of resistance from big companies and there's a lot of lobby behind it. So I'm very curious what this leads us. And, and Liam, to your point, like I also look at Bitcoin and different, totally different discussion. . Charlie: Well, I mean, the interesting point you raised was you were switching to electric. That means sod all, where does the electricity come from? Thomas: Oh, look. Hey, I, I fully agree. I had the discussion many times, like fossil fuel, coal mate, we, we take coal, like scroll oil. . What I will say is, is this, regarding AI, like we've been doing data science ETL pipelines for the last 10 years. So I'd we did a AI before it was cool. And, and it's still, that's still the uncool side of AI, right? Gen AI is the cool shiny side, but that's what all AI has going for them. They were front runner. They have, Gen AI. How, how quick did OpenAI get their 90 million, it was five days or six days, something like, it was an insane amount of, of, subscriptions or people signing up in like less than five days. What do we have in, in blockchain? We have an ETF, which by the way, it works really well, but it says something that, that our industry is more of an infrastructure, you know, potentially heavy finance industry. Where AI is more like it becomes more of a consumer product. Liam: You say that sorry,, but BlackRock just announced the hundred million dollar seed investment of a tokenized asset fund. So they're tokenizing assets on blockchain on Ethereum as of like two days ago. So it is also happening in the tokenization part. Thomas: It is. It is. And I'm curious if that will actually accelerate things, right? I really hope so. You know, throwing money at something, or getting natural adoption like OpenAI did, which got a lot of money thrown at it. I mean, what was it, a historical amount of billions? Charlie: That's a good point. Thomas: I fully agree with, with but money doesn't solve everything. I have a great last thing I will say about this. I used to work for a project, a billion dollar unicorn project from a certain country that always, throw money at the problem. It's kind of like that, oh yeah, we're having, you know, one, one mother, nine months for a baby, right? Now we'll have nine, nine mothers in 6 months. Some things you can't accelerate with money. And it is really great that BlackRock throws a hundred mil at a tokenization. I'm really bullish on that, but still, that doesn't like the fact that an open AI gets what, 90 million, signups in less than five days or in five, 10 days, I don't remember the numbers says something about the adoption that we don't have while we're doing this for a very long time, right? Like we've been pitching and pushing for mass adoption for such a long time. I actually saw that Starbucks NFT program died a couple days ago, which was, in my opinion, also a shitty program. It says something about bad implementation, right? And we're really good in our industry to do bad implementation or to focus too much on technology. And that's something that makes me a bit sad because there's a lot of good solutions out there, and I'm sure you've both seen them. And it's just a shame that they're not being shown for what they really are and instead it's pitched as, it's a great blockchain solution. Nobody cares, right? Sorry. Liam: So let's say I think this is we're delving into what and we're going to stop this at this point, although I'm going to get the final say. This is essentially What The 3 After Dark because this is the stuff we're going to go into. We're going to push back on each other much more than this. The one thing I just wanted to leave it on was, you also just said that you were building an AI before it was cool. AI was being built and has been worked on for 20, 30 years. So you've got to remember that as well. Like you think, oh AI got adoption really quickly. Generative AI got adoption. I was using Dali, not Dali, DaVinci in like 2019 or whatever. And there were other models before that. So it had its unicorn app moment. We need something similar in Web3. Yes, I would agree. Yes, but I think it's wrong to suggest that they're like parallels. Like OpenAI came out of nowhere with this AI thing. Thomas: I mean, no, okay I fully agree and again, this is an After Dark discussion a hundred percent, but I will say that what is it? They do have a front runner, right? Charlie: I'm sure I do. You folded your hands real quick there, Thomas. I, I'm not sure I do agree with Liam. Thomas: Well, no, no, I mean, no, I, I will Charlie: AI is the consumer side but blockchain is like... Liam: Okay we're going full AfterDark now. No, of course there's been AI versions of AI video editing, AI this, like what it was is actually way less penetration the blockchain's got. I actually say the blockchain and organization has got massive amount of penetration over its time. Look like Coinbase becomes every, every top of the bull market. Coinbase becomes the number one finance app on downloads. The only AI app that before ChatGPT was maybe a number one was probably some sort of face fixing app for Instagram photos. So no, I call bullshit. Thomas: Well, well, I mean, okay, so, so, and, and, I'm not sure if we're, we're comparing like the whole AI industry or Gen AI with blockchain, right? Liam: I think You have to compare the whole AI industry. You can't say, oh, Gen AI is a new thing now. Oh, okay. Thomas: I'm not. I'm not saying that. Liam: When we finally get a market fit in blockchain, I'll say, this is not blockchain anymore. This is "Gen Blockchain". And we've just got adoption in the first week and it's the best. We're going to carry this conversation on from here in the very first, What The 3 After Dark and the three of us are going to duke it out, so you've got a little bit taster of what's going on. And the fact that I've stopped, I feel like I'm going to get like hit on two sides because we've kind of only got my final view on it..