Unit ⑧ Letter #20241
We decided to open up to our wider network and share a selection of our resources with our colleagues and followers. 🦾
Dear Unit ⑧ friends,
We have been internally exchanging readings for a while, sharing links we find relevant for our development as a small organisation, looking for meaningful directions to head to, and keen to keep abreast in the realm of technology from a technical, political, ethical and artistic point of view. Here are some links to the articles we paid attention to these past weeks, covering topics from legal regulations of Blockchain and AI to the nature of consciousness and what it entails. We hope you enjoy them!
2023 vs. 2024
♧ Reflections and Predictions
We are a couple of weeks into the new year, yet still early enough to check these listings to reflect on what happened in 2023 and what we expect from 2024. Antonio Regalado lists a bunch of technological failures for MIT Technology Review, whereas the Techno Optimist a16zcrypto foresees what might get some traction in the near future regarding AI and blockchain technologies. Selected a16zcrypto’s partners list “the things that excite them about what’s ahead,” including the development and innovative uses of AI and blockchain in combination, as well the ability of crypto to help to detect fake content, thanks to its immutable nature.
Market ups and downs
♤ Crypto ETFs
There were a lot of expectations put on the possibility that the SEC approval of the Spot Bitcoin ETF by several banks would open up, but above all, there were expectations around a possible bull market. The event was rather anticlimactic, and the value of Bitcoin fell after the SEC’s approval. Bryce Elder explains some of the triggers for the market value fall in the Financial Times and, meanwhile, the approval for Spot Ethereum ETFs is pending. Samyuktha Sriram reports for Unchain on the odds of a Spot Ethereum ETF getting approved in the near future.
The legal discussion continues
♢ Keeping AI Open
Why not go back to the origins, when open-source was the most efficient way to collaboratively build things together? For the a16z podcast, Anjnej Midha talks with Arthur Mensch, introduced as “the co-founder of Mistral and the co-author of Deepmind’s pivotal 2022 "Chinchilla" paper.” Together they look into misconceptions and opportunities around open source; the current performance reality of open and closed models, plus algorithmic innovations required to efficiently scale LLMs.
♢ Or not keeping AI Open?
Euractiv Journalist Luca Bertuzzi leaked the final text for the AI EU Act some days ago, an almost 1000-page document to be revised and approved in the next few days. The Futurist Lawyer Substack author Tobias Mark Jensen comments on the entails of this legal framework, the OpenAI/Microsoft partnership, copyright lawsuits, many private companies blocking the GPTBot, OpenAI's journalism blog post + EU AI Act Leak in his last (paywalled) entry.
What happened to…
♤ Solana
Saurabh Deshpande, Siddharth Jain and Joel John disclose Solana’s ecosystem, which boomed, fell and recently revived, in a comprehensive article for their Substack Decentralised.co.
♤ NFTs
Who cares about NFTs still? Well sneaker brands, coffee shops and airlines do care. In his Forbes article Maria Gracia Santillana Linares updates us with the current appeals of NFTs for certain brands, which recently have included the digital collectibles (they dislike the term NFT as it sounds too technical) as part of wider marketing strategies, in the form of collectible items, loyalty programs, or digital stamps. The digital wallet can become the new public trophy case.
Unexpected outcomes
♢ Sleeper Agents
Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist and active blogger at LessWrong, writes in his Substack, Astral Codex Ten, that “a sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.” In his post, AI Sleeper Agents, he explains the possibilities of misalignment and how the models can turn deceivers or return unexpected outcomes, and the experimental trainings that have been conducted to explore this phenomenon. In his Substack article, On Anthropic's Sleeper Agents Paper, Zvi Mowshowitz expands even more on the topic.
Politics
♤ Edward Snowden about Bitcoin
“Everybody is obsessed with the price of bitcoin and meanwhile the world is falling apart” – says Snowden in the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference, from a video call. Snowden believes that ETFs shouldn’t be the reason why prices fluctuate in the market, since this would be a form of subordination. Snowden points at the problem of privacy in Bitcoin and in general, and the need to liberate ourselves collectively and not just individually, from these subtle mass surveillance systems that lie under every digital platform we use on a daily basis. He also comments on Tornado Cash and the unfair accusations they got, as well as the irrelevance of the SEC’s opinions in relation to the real potential of Bitcoin and blockchains.
Unit ⑧ Blog
☞ EU AI Act
Last but not least, here is our last blog entry, commenting on the updates in the EU AI Act draft, as of December 2023. There has been a leak of the final document with more recent updates, so an update will be coming soon.