This week we talk about something we meant to discuss last week — Macklemore’s new song “Hind’s Hall,” and politics in music and literature. There’s some Immortal Technique, the Coup, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young thrown in there too. We also talk about the pretty bad polls that came out for the Biden campaign, which showed him losing in some weird ways in battleground states and took a deeper look into the crosstabs, always the more interesting part of any poll.
thanks as always for listening!
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Joining us today are Carolina Dalla Chiesa and Crystal Dozier. Together, they mesh Ostrom and Zelizer’s approaches and highlight the importance of using interdisciplinary methods to better understand economic exchanges. Carolina focuses on the symbolic meanings of money and economic governance, while Crystal explores archaeological studies of non-market societies. They both articulate how their unique backgrounds and research focus contribute to a richer dialogue between economic sociology and institutional economics.
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Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to seasons one and two!
President Biden plans another $1 billion in military aid to Israel. Michael Cohen faces tough cross-examination. Missed warning before bridge collapse. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
Erik Voorhees, a crypto OG, has launched Venice, a private, uncensorable, open-source competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, powered by a decentralized crypto network.
In the episode, Erik and Venice’s COO Teana Baker-Taylor delve into the problems with censorship and data in current AI agents, including how they create honeypots of information about users’ search history for hackers, or that they can be absurdly politically correct, such as refusing to create images of Caucasian people. As they point out, there’s also the risk that the companies managing them could be censoring the models to please the Chinese government, in order to access the market in that country. They talk about their plan for Venice to gain market share, considering that DuckDuckGo, a privacy-preserving competitor to Google, has a much smaller market share. And they explain why they intend for Venice to eventually use the compute of Morpheus, or other decentralized crypto-powered compute networks.
They also critique the SEC’s current regulatory approach to crypto, calling it “a joke.” Additionally, they explore the concept of AI agents using cryptocurrencies as their primary currency.
Show highlights:
Why Erik decided to move into artificial intelligence and merge it with crypto
What problems decentralized AI would solve and why it's hard to solve sexist and racist views in LLMs
The differences between ChatGPT, and other similar products, and Venice AI
Why privacy is so important for users, according to Erik, and how Venice doesn't store the users' information
How central governments could manipulate information to their own benefit and how to avoid it
Whether people will shift from using search engines to LLMs
What Morpheus is and its goal to provide decentralized computation for AI
How Erik and Teana believe crypto and AI will continue to work together
Erik's and Teana's thoughts on some of the recent government actions against founders of crypto privacy services such as Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash
Why Erik believes that the SEC has become a joke
Visit Unchained’s website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com
Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.
Russian President Vladimir Putin heads to China for a two-day summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York says people under 30 and lower-income families are the most likely to be maxed out and fall behind on their credit card bills. And the Canadian wildfire season gets underway as fires prompt evacuations and threaten towns in Western provinces.
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Today's episode of Up First was edited by Nick Spicer, Julia Redpath, Miguel Macias, Lisa Thomson and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ben Abrams and Kaity Kline. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Zac Coleman.
Michael Cohen has been testifying in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial. Did the former president’s fixer provide what the prosecution had hoped for? The Middle East has a militia problem. Many of the region’s governments are too weak to keep them down; others simply let them in (10:36). And investigating whether there is more or less sex on the silver screen these days (19:06).
Dwarkesh Patel is the host of the Dwarkesh Podcast, where he's interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Ilya Sustkever, Dario Amodei, and more AI leaders. Patel joins Big Technology to discuss the current state and future trajectory of AI development, including the potential for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence. Tune in to hear Patel's insights on key issues like AI scaling, alignment, safety, and governance, as well as his perspective on the competitive landscape of the AI industry. We also cover the influence of the effective altruism movement on Patel's thinking, his podcast strategy, and the challenges and opportunities ahead as AI systems become more advanced. Listen for a wide-ranging and insightful conversation that grapples with some of the most important questions of our technological age.
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Alex Gallego was born and raised in Colombia. He has always identified as a builder, and as a kid, he would help his Uncle re-build dirt bike engines, and was the kid that would take apart his friend's computer when they weren't looking. Once he arrived in the US, his Dad got a computer, which started his love for tech and cryptography. Outside of tech, he is married with three boys, so his time is consumed with being present with his boys, to which he stated he loves being a Dad. Beyond that, he enjoys mentally reseting by doing mountain biking and road cycling.
Alex was working with a large dataset in ad tech. After this startup did well, he was hooked, he went on to build a computing framework, which eventually sold to Alkamai. During his time at that company, he started playing with squeezing every bit of compute out of hardware - and decided to combine this in order to optimize storage.
