Month: May 2024

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.

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Erik Voorhees' latest venture, Venice, is a private, uncensorable, open-source AI agent run on decentralized computation. 

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

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

First Bits + Bips episode: Bits + Bips: Does Macroeconomics Point to a Potential Crypto Supercycle?

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Guests:

Erik Voorhees, Founder and CEO of Venice AI

Previous appearances on Unchained:

• Erik Voorhees and Cobie on Why FTX Loaned Out Customers’ Assets
• Why ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees Thinks Toxic Bitcoin Maximalism Is Bullshit
• ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees on How Crypto Will Separate Money and State

Teana Baker-Taylor, COO at Venice AI

Links |

Previous coverage on Unchained crypto/AI:

• When AI and Blockchain Meet, How Can Each Technology Benefit?
• The Chopping Block: Why AI Will Change the Course of History in Crypto
• 5 Use Cases of AI in Blockchain
• A Beginner's Guide to AI Tokens

Venice AI:

• Erik’s thread announcing Venice 
• The Separation of Mind and State

Architecture:

• About Morpheus.Network
• Messari: What is Akash Network?

LLMs:

• MIT Technology Review: LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention
• China Talk: Censorship’s Impact on China’s Chatbots - by Nicholas Welch

Recent cases on privacy:

• CoinDesk: Samourai Wallet Founders Arrested and Charged With Money Laundering
• Cointelegraph: DOJ’s Tornado Cash arguments show ‘obvious disdain for privacy’ — Lawyer
• CNBC: North Korea crypto hacking activity soars to record high in 2023, new report shows
• Reuters: Exclusive: UN experts investigate 58 cyberattacks worth $3 bln by North Korea
• Erik’s post on the right to have privacy

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Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC.  Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz. 

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

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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).

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Alabama

• Governor Ivey signs bill that claws back incentives to company's re: unions
• Governor Ivey signs bill that prohibits tracking of firearm & ammunition sales
• State lawmaker says fellow  Democrat worked to derail her Juneteenth bill
• State auditor and Eagle Scout calls on values to be returned to Boy Scouts

National

• Judicial Watch finds docs on how illegals are being registered to vote in DC
• Biden announces tariffs on EVs from China, GOP call it election year ploy
• Tik Tok creators now suing in federal court over law that divests or bans the app
• Trump says hype around Covid or Bird Flu is not going to work this time around
• Paralegal admits on witness stand that some recordings of Trump were deleted
• NC Chapel Hill board votes to  divert entire budget for DEI to Public safety 
• KC Chief Kicker Harrison Butker speaks at commencement for Catholic college