35 Burst results for "Deepfakes"
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"So cool. I think it's cool. And yet I still don't fully like I feel like I understand it. I think the TLDR is why am I bullish on this? It's just one of many things that I think like there is so much juice left in crypto to squeeze. Like we are just tip of the iceberg. We can't even imagine some of the future stuff. So you think we're going to sell all that this this cheap block space we're creating because I've been worried about that lately, David. We've got real cheap block space, but maybe autonomous worlds will buy it all up from us. No, that's right. That's right. Ryan, what are you bullish on? I am bullish on what we're talking about earlier. There are crypto people showing up in D.C. and the good people this time. All right. Guess who wasn't there, David? Sam Bankman-Fried. Oh, yeah. Right. All right. I mean, he was in jail. And I think that crypto has been a little late to the party with respect to like participation in D.C. But it's here now. And like some reasons it's been late to the party. I think most other industries would have been in D.C. lobbying from like day one and participating in the way that crypto is from day one. But crypto didn't. And I think part of it comes from this core kind of libertarian governments are bad type of ethos. That's maybe one part of it. Another is I think there are some builders in the space who are a bit more techno utopian or basically like we don't have to play the lobby games like the old tribe did. If we build it, they will come. They'll see it's a better system. They'll just adopt it. And then there's another element of why we haven't participated. We just really didn't have the use cases. Like what do you go to the U.S. government and be like, yeah, we're going to supplant the dollar with this new cryptocurrency. They're not going to act very favorably to that. But now we have stable coins, for instance. Now we have DeFi. Now we have the creator economy with NFTs. But I think the realization crypto has had that if it doesn't show up in D.C., if the good guys don't go to D.C., someone else will. Someone like SBF. He really revealed that there is a power vacuum to fill and that if you're ambitious, if you're confident, then you can go fill that vacuum with political bribes to try to capture all of the entire regulatory apparatus and bend it to your will. And so anyway, I'm bullish that SBF is out and some of the good guys are in and actually playing this game in a good way and that we're getting organized, that exchanges are there, that our lawyers are on top of things, that our educators and lobbyists are there, that our builders like Kevin Owocki earlier in this episode showed up in D.C. And I still feel like we have a massively, like a very long, long fight in the U.S. We got to fight the IRS. We got to fight the SEC, the CFTC. The entire past year, the roll up, we have been talking about regulatory way more than like I'm comfortable. Like I hate talking about it every week and yet that is the thing that we are fighting right now. But I am bullish with kind of this new wave of progress in our participation there. And channeling, like we're just more aligned and organized than we ever have been. And I think we'll make real progress in the U.S., even though it won't be easy. Yeah. And I'm reminded about I think my favorite line out of permission list, which was Hester Peirce's quote, which is that the courts are on our side. The law is on our side. We just have to show up. Yeah. And we haven't, we actually haven't seen. We haven't even showed up yet. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't even seen what we can do when we show up. 100 percent. Yeah. So absolutely massive unlock. David, meme of the week. You ready for this? Meme of the week. Yep. Uh-huh. What are we looking at? This is 100 percent convinced that Ryan John Adams put this meme together. The quote is, another unregistered securities exchange, absolutely disgusting. And the picture is what looks like a middle school Pokemon competition with a nice young lady in a Pokemon suit. Look at her trading her cards. Look at her. Like what's going on here. Look at her violating securities laws.Lock these kids up. I bet she's not even paying her taxes. David, we got a moment of zen this week that we just found prior to this episode. It's actually from a source you would not expect. I believe that source is Van Eck of all places. Yeah. So we're going to play that moment of zen in just a minute. Do you want to say anything to tee this up? Van Eck, very trad fi, boomer capital, uncharacteristically zoomer meme. That's all I'll say. It's really good. It's really good. Disclosures. We're going to end with risks in a minute. But first we disclose. Bankless Ventures, as we mentioned, is an investor in Phoenix. We talked about them earlier in the show. David and I are both advisors to Matter Labs as well in the ZK Sync project. And of course, David and I hold ETH. We are long term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes. I'm going to end with this. You know, crypto is risky. You could get phished. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Ethereum. Now in an ETF form. Coming soon. Follow us to stay informed on the release. Oh, and HODL for KOF. We'll be right back.
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"All my friends are like virtual, so you know. So this take requires some context. You know how we talk about blockchain fees are the taxes for the system. Like the gas fees are the Ethereum taxes that you pay for the protocol? Yeah, they go to the public good of the protocol, which yeah, got it. Fits the pattern, right? But Dr. Membrane here, I think, provides an alternative perspective. He says, or they say, a tax is dictated top down. An auction means pricing is set bottom up. In other words, if they didn't want to pay that price, the gas fee, that wouldn't be the price. The only reason the price is that is because there are willing buyers. So I think as we move forward and talk about, I think we will continue to talk about gas fees are the tax to Ethereum. But there's this important nuance that the taxes to Ethereum are determined by the market, not by a top down, heavy handed system. A tax that's driven by market forces, is how you put it. What's the context for this tweet though? It looks like it's a response to a threat. I was arguing with Solana people about tax. High fees versus low fees kind of argument? Yeah, exactly. Got it. Vance Spencer tweet, his second one of the episode. Wow. Big week for Vance. It is now clear that there is going to be 10 to 100 restaking protocols and that the restaking game will increasingly become a hot ball of money. Why? It is unlikely that any one primitive data availability, bridge, oracle secured by restaked ETH will be able to meaningfully augment ETH layer one yield for the 23 million ETH and growing, staked over a long period of time. Moving from one restaking protocol to another, while their inflation is high, will become the game. All right. Let's take us to this corner of the universe here in crypto, restaking. This is like Eigen layer. Help us recall. So restaking is first you stake it and then you restake it. And the reason you might restake it with a protocol like Eigen layer is so that you can get some additional yields and put that capital at risk in exchange for performing some other and get some other function and generate some other yields. So Vance is saying that this is going to be a hot ball of money and a game and there'll be many market participants. Yeah. So you remember how we were talking about all the friend tech clones that have spun up and forked out? Yes. How their Bitcoin fork and fair launch era, the ICO, food farms in 2020. There's this pattern in crypto of first you have this one thing and then you have the explosion of other things that are all kind of iterations on that. The cool thing about Eigen layer is that it's actually not just one thing. Eigen layer data availability is one restaking chain. I can't remember the name of it, but there's another Oracle chain, which is why the Oracle thing is an example here. There's a bridge chain. There's many different use cases for Eigen layer restaking networks. So what he's saying is applying this phenomenon that we totally understand where as soon as one thing is successful, you have the iterations and iterations. And then you also have the liquidity locus, the mercenary yield farmers of DeFi summer. There's always going to be demand for a new restaking network because that's the pattern that we see in crypto. Wait, is he talking about there's going to be a ton of different Eigen layers, like restaking protocols or a ton of different sort of... Eigen layer networks, not Eigen layers. I see. So it's different protocols that will demand for E. He's not calling for a forking of Eigen layer. He's calling for just a large supply of interested restaking capital that will produce demand for further restaking networks as the yields get sucked up by more and more people playing this game. Well, I think this clarifies it. So in his next tweet, he said, I think the winners here are the dominant ETH one staking protocols. So that would be like a Lido or a Rocketpool. And generally, ETH itself. People will get more comfortable using it, withdraw more sexy to on chain and continue bootstrapping the ETH monetary premium. That has always been my thesis behind Eigen layer is that this just shifts power, the pendulum from the alt many alt layer one thesis to the ether is the capital of the Internet. Yeah, it strengthens the ETH money thing and the cold kind of monetary game that all layer ones need to play. David, are we at peak ignorance of crypto? That's what this next take says. What are we looking at? Yeah. So this is Ken Dieter, who tweets out this graphic, which I'll explain here in a second and says, this is my mental model for comparing how crypto progresses through time to how people outside of crypto perceive that progress. So we got is we got two lines here. One is a kind of stair steppy upwards into the right green line. And so the stair steps, I think, are kind of happen inversion, inverted to the market. So when there is a bull market, we hit a plateau because no one gets any fucking work done in a bull market because we're all gambling and it's raining money everywhere and everyone's distracted. And then this, that's the peak bull. And then in the peak bear is when work actually gets done. But everyone thinks that crypto is totally dead. And I actually appreciate this subtle nuance in this graphic that the what crypto can actually do line this stair stepping up into the right line is also accelerating because progress compounds. But meanwhile, what everyone thinks crypto can do is kind of sign you saying oscillating around what crypto can actually do. So the axes here are it's over time, but it's capabilities over time. And so the green line signifies that what crypto can actually do is greater capabilities over time. That's actually happening. And it happens in kind of like different waves as we unlock various things. But what happens during bull markets is we overshoot the capabilities and we're like, it's the best thing ever. It's going to change everything that's going to have a future. You totally do. And then what happens during the bear markets is we're like, it's doomed. It's over. You know, crypto is good for nothing. It's just a bunch of Ponzi schemes and there's nothing that it's going to affect and we'll never go mainstream. Right. And we're at the would you say we're at peak bear right now? Oh, yeah. I think we're coming out of it, actually. Like the whole show of force from. Yeah. What does that have to do with peak ignorance of crypto? Is he just saying like in the bear, you are peak ignorant? Yeah. Like, no, none of your friends want to hear about the pudgy penguins in Wal-Mart right now. So that's where we are in the cycles. Peak ignorance. That's where we are in the cycle. Yeah, that's right. Good name for this episode. Peak ignorance. David, last take of the week. What's this one? Oh, this is such a good one. This is a deep cut for the both for long term and newer listeners who don't know about these dynamics. Coinfessions is a Twitter account that just tweets out like statements from people. It's like a it's a meme account that tweets out statements from anonymous people. Real statements, though? Real statements that are submitted. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So the statement that was submitted to this Coinfession was I was employed by a Bitcoin mining company to spread negative information about Ethereum on Twitter and 4chan for a duration of two years. Now if you are a veteran, you understand exactly who this company is. It's called Blockstream. They are the mining company. I mean, this is my take. This is my guess. I do not know this fact, but man, like prove me wrong. Here's another bit of information. My first boss in crypto was a Bitcoin OG and who converted to Ethereum in the ICO mania. And but also just like disclosed to the entire company that like him and a few of his Bitcoin whale owning friends financed the subversion campaign of Ethereum from from 2015, bro. He just told us the whole entire company like, yeah, we paid for like we paid for like FUD. We paid for the FUD of Ethereum. Like the extra FUD on top of the DAO hack, Ethereum Classic and all of these things. Every time something negative went down, they just magnified it tenfold. Yes. Yeah. The Ethereum is centralized. You can't run a node like just FUDing Ethereum just because that was that you could play that game. It was truly the Wild West back then. And so this coin-fession is just like the Blockstream employed, like you just look go look at the Groubles if you remember Groubles. Samson Mao. Like if you want to listen to the most cringe piece of content ever, listen to Samson Mao from Blockstream and Vitalik Buterin on what Bitcoin did and oh my God, that was so bad. I can't believe Vitalik did that. Anyways, these are the tactics that have existed and still exist. And I say I would say that I think that it's gone from Bitcoin, like it's left its scar on the Bitcoin culture. These tactics still exist. It still happens. This is still an alive and it's probably being it's probably higher up the market cap stack than you would think. You have to curate your news like your sources of information in this space because there's FUD. It's no wonder it's so difficult to find your way in crypto, right? People who are relentlessly on crypto Twitter, pushing narratives all of the time like that. You should proceed with caution unless they're podcasters, right? They unless they're podcasters. Yeah. Let's not us. We wouldn't do these things. Oh my God. We didn't even mention boys in jail right now. And that's fine. I didn't make the agenda. Yeah, I didn't want to. Anyway, moving on. David, what are you bullish on this week? OK. I attended. There's this rabbit hole that I know exists that I've been trying to go down. OK. I've gotten like nibbles of it. I went to a meetup in New York that was like 30 people. It kind of felt me felt like the Ethereum meetups of old where like, you know, folding chairs and like this basement basement kind of looking thing and everyone is there just because we're nerds looking at this stuff. What do you what are you nerding out about? This is the words that we have described are autonomous worlds. This is being pioneered by Lattice, Xerox Park guys, MUD, but there's just interest in this. Who are these people? Lattice, MUD? I don't think I've heard. Like very skunk-worky people. These are individual Twitter accounts or yeah, like the Xerox Park guys are funded by grants. So they're they're just like the developers, developers, autonomous worlds. It's like crypto gaming, but not like the crypto gaming that, you know, fully as much logic on chain as possible. And so you get unique properties about that. Ryan, I think everyone understands when I say NFT, there's like, what's an NFT? It's like it's a crypto punk, it's a pudgy penguin, it's a collectible of some kind. It's a JPEG. And maybe maybe the team adds some like utility or access to that. That is. Or a plushie toy in Wal-Mart. That exactly. That is the Stone Age of what NFTs can be. Inert objects. That is like the first iteration, kind of like the Bitcoin is the Stone Age of crypto. My take. Ethereum is like the sci-fi version of this. We are we are in the Stone Age version of NFTs. What if I told you, Ryan, that an NFT could be a universe with specific laws of physics and specific types of property rights, internal property rights, and that universe is defined by an NFT and that NFT is transferable? One, I don't know entirely what you mean. Two, it sounds cool. Three, do I actually want that? I don't know. When universes can become like, again, with state, internal state, internal laws that are different from Ethereum and can have their own their own internal logic. And that is a transferable object. I mean, we talked about in our metaverse episode, what are NFTs? They're digital objects. You know, it's an object, a whole entire universe, bro. It's funny you use the M word, the metaverse word, because that has so much fallen out of fashion. And it's, by the way, crypto started using that word before Zuckerberg took it took it over. That was our word. And then he killed it. And it's anyway, it's dead, dead, dead now. But do you know that that that statement of basically like everything that, you know, the bulls predicted about crypto will come true. It's just a matter of timing. The same thing happened with the Internet. I feel like that's very much true. And this is basically that concept. It's property rights, digital property rights, autonomous worlds inside of like what you're talking about. Another word for autonomous worlds is like metaverse, as we used to kind of call it. Are you saying you're seeing hints, we're seeing green shoots of like growth, new growth in this autonomous world. How do I enter an autonomous world right now? Is there a game I play or like? Yeah, there is. Maybe you'll resonate with this metaphor. Mud is like this game engine that this the mud team are that are building this game called Sky Strife. So that is the game that you actually see on screen built on mud. And so they're kind of dog fooding their own game. Is this happening anytime soon? No, this is this like needs years of iteration and development. Like some of the more informed numbers I've gotten is like three plus years. But there's a there there. And it's kind of one of the big pills that I remember taking way back when, when I realized that like, yo, you can put any logic on chain. We just need to figure out how to compress it and make it finish, make it scalable. This is why this is what they're doing. Like Mud is putting it's an on chain game universe engine. And people are trying to figure out how to make rich, vibrant, stateful universes inside of like things like an NFT.
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"All right. What do we got coming up next? Coming up next. Did you know there's like six forks of friend tech and it's all on different chains. We'll talk about all of them, but not really. We're just going to burn through those. Vitalik deep fakes and how we can stop them. And also Chase Bank has banning crypto payments in the UK. Oof, not great. That is why we go bankless of course. So we're going to get to all of that and more, but first I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially MetaMask portfolio. If you have not opened up your MetaMask portfolio, it is a new and improved way of looking at all your crypto assets and all the various chains. There's a link in the show notes. Go find out. Let's go hear from them right now. Are you a MetaMask user? Well, you're listening to Bankless. So of course you are the wallet, you know, and love just got a whole lot better. MetaMask portfolio is the ultimate one-stop shop for all of your crypto needs. It gives you a holistic view of your crypto portfolio across multiple chains and multiple addresses all at once you can easily view and manage all your coins, tokens, and NFTs in one convenient place, just by connecting your wallet. MetaMask portfolio goes beyond just viewing your portfolio though. Inside the portfolio, you can do all the incredible money verbs that make DeFi so powerful. You can buy, swap, bridge, and stake your crypto assets with ease. It's like having a powerful battle station for all your DeFi moves right at your fingertips. So if you're looking to do more in web3 your way, MetaMask portfolio is the answer. I already know that you have MetaMask wallet, so go check out your MetaMask portfolio. Learn more at metamask.io slash portfolio. You know Uniswap, it's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bankless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap labs just released the Uniswap mobile wallet for iOS, the newest easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With the Uniswap wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, polygon, arbitrum, and optimism. On the Uniswap mobile wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use wallet connect to connect to any web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap mobile wallet. Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Ryan, this clip of Vitalik has shown me which token I want to buy next. Let's play it. All right. Everyone remembers when I sold billions of Shiba Inu tokens back in the day. Do I regret it? Well, I didn't. That is not until I heard about Shib exchange. Shib exchange is pretty revolutionary in the crypto space. Making Shiba Inu the quote token is just genius. If I still had all those Shiba Inu tokens, I know exactly where I would take them. Let's fucking go. Well, that is classic. Let's fucking go. That's classic. Oh my God. The let's fucking go is just the funniest way to end this thing. Like when I was watching it, it's like, yeah, yeah, I can. I know Vitalik's mannerisms. I know that that was like manipulated a little bit. But man, if you're not paying attention or if you don't know Vitalik, then like, yeah, this guy just filled Shib exchange. What do you think that is out of 10? Like the quality of this? This is one of the best quality defakes I've seen in a while because he's got like relatively natural body movements, even though they're a little bit repetitive, like the body movements are natural. And the voice was close-ish. The voice is pretty good. It's not quite there, but it's close-ish. Vitalik will never, ever say let's fucking go. I mean, with a different script, I think I would give it like a seven or eight out of 10, right? Whereas like a 10 for me would be like indiscernible from somebody who's spent some time virtually with Vitalik. It would be indiscernible from that experience. And this is maybe a seven or eight, which like these are going to be everywhere. These are pretty good clips. Yeah. I mean, so many bots on Twitter all over the place of just like Vitalik, you know, is giving away free ETH. It's always been this way since like 2016 onwards. Vitalik's given free ETH. His image is going to be used in deep fakes in all sorts of ways. So what is the prevention for this? How do we fix this problem? Well, of course, there's the Ethereum attestation service, but that's not a quick fix. That is going to be years of infrastructure and building and progress. We have the tools. We just need maturation and development. The fix is that everyone just needs to know that the Internet is not a safe place. And especially with the emergence of private keys and owning your own assets, like the Internet is very unsecure at this very moment. Yeah, it's a lot of phishing. Like a lot of people want to steal your money. This is actually useful, too, on Twitter is the community notes. I've been looking at this more and more on Twitter. Readers added context they thought people would want to know. The video is a deep fake. So that, yeah, that's good context to know. So be on your guard and we'll get back to that. But hopefully something like Ethereum attestation service will allow Vitalik to release a Vitalik content signed with his private keys. That is much that that is unforgeable as not fakable. Whoever has his private keys can actually sign it. The bull case for this is that actually every single bit of content will have some sort of attestation. And so weird content will be missing the attestation. And so it's the idea is like eventually everything will have some sort of tag of inception. Like where did this come from? And content without that tag will be extremely sus. Exactly. David, this is a pretty cool experiment in Buenos Aires. Government ID coming to Ethereum again via ZK sync. What's this? Yeah. So there's actually an interesting corollary. I mean, maybe I'm just making this up in my head, but like pudgy penguins, when you buy this stuffed animal, you have this like NFT that has this digital identity on ZK sync. This is I mean, it's not anything to do with pudgy penguins or stuffed animals, but Buenos Aires, the government of Buenos Aires, which is, of course, part of the country of Argentina, but is also its own kind of like city state, Buenos Aires citizens will be able to download this wallet and claim essential personal documents such as birth and marriage certificates, which are very important documents in Argentina for accessing the social benefits using a digital wallet. So like self custody of your digital documents using a private key, using a wallet. And so this is being also being used on ZK sync era. And so it's just a way for like infrastructure of the nation state, city state sector of things using public infrastructure to do things that they already need to do better. Pretty cool. You could put anything in your wallet. Penguins or passports, right? This is cool. You know, Kraken, our number one recommended exchange for 2023, David, you know what they're up to. Tell me they are getting ready to push into stock trading. This is a rumor. So I took this tweet from Walter Bloomberg crypto exchange plans to push into stock trading. This came from the Bloomberg article that says this still remember that I asked to Kraken's like, yo, what's going on with this? And their response is, Kraken is always exploring how it can power the global adoption of crypto currencies. We can't comment on rumors or speculation. We're looking to broaden and enhance our offering. So clients continue to have secure and seamless access to Kraken's full product suite. Pretty generic, neither confirm nor deny. Didn't say no. They did not say no. They did not say no. We have no special knowledge about this. No we don't. All we know is basically that statement, but this would be cool if true. I would say as someone who has not bought an equity and a stock since 2018 up until this week, actually, we'll talk about that later in a different show, Robinhood ever said that we always thought Robinhood was like the app for the people, right? Like democratizing access to finance and then the whole like Citadel GME thing just totally popped that bubble. One of the big reasons why I haven't bought an equity is because I don't want to use Robinhood. That's tradfi. There is demand, believe it or not, for crypto people to buy. No, I believe it. But we just need a crypto native platform to go back to the old world. And Robinhood has good UX. Have you ever used something like E-Trade or ever used something like Fidelity or something like this? Charles Schwab? No way. Like you couldn't. Like you would not be able to navigate this. I wouldn't know how to do it. It's so stupid. It's so like 2000s era and crypto exchanges have gotten the UX right. Like it's easy to navigate. And so why not start listing other assets? Take Kraken Pro UX and put it into equities and we can talk. Maybe Kraken's doing that. Maybe they're not. We have nothing. Maybe it's a rumor. Yeah. Could just be a rumor. A friend tech fork for every chain. Okay. There are all of these friend tech clones. We should have. We expected this would happen, right? Of course, a successful app is going to have like thousands of clones. What specifically is happening? How many clones do we have at this point? Okay. So on base, there's friends tech. There's post tech on Arbitrum. There's frenzy on Solana. There's fan.tech on Mantle. There's alpha on Bitcoin. What the shit? Bitcoin. What's Bitcoin L3? That's what this says. I don't know. People have been trying to tweet at me saying, hey, David, you're really popular on alpha on Bitcoin. You should sign up. And I'm like, I don't believe you. No one is in the Bitcoin world. They're trying to steal your private keys, David. Of course, these are clones, so there's not a lot of difference. But there's some like minor innovation. So one version of this clone is introducing a bidding action for new accounts in order to prevent bots. Another is including features like public and private posts, so you could see accounts you could follow on Twitter, dark mode, stats mode, that sort of thing. Referral systems, so some are even working through the economics of these platforms and like juicing them, making them maybe even more Ponzi-like in the games. So there's like these micro innovations that are happening across all of these clones. And I think that this will push things forward is the optimistic view is some of these features will work. Others won't. The ones that don't fall by the wayside and die. The ones that do will improve the product. Friend Tech will continue to have to level up. Fortunes will be made. Fortunes will be lost. You know, that's what always happens in this space. But I do think a lot of experience experiments will kind of level us up. I guess maybe the bear case for all of this is like too much fragmentation and we're just chasing a bunch of kind of, I don't know, nothing products. And this is instead of innovating, everyone's copying the other apps. I guess you could take a bear case on it, too. But yeah, overall, I think it's cool. And of course it would happen. This is crypto. It's completely permissionless. Well, as soon as you do get the forking phenomenon, it is just a big plus one to the legitimacy of the actual inception. Yeah, right. Like Bitcoin had the fork and fair launch era. There was the ICO mania after Ethereum, DeFi food farms, like anytime something gets forked a bajillion times, whatever is getting forked, it's very successful. In some measure. And I will say, even though I don't really understand the long term economics, the long term sustainability of Friend Tech, like it doesn't care what I think, it is still alive. And so I'll give a plus one to that. I am too exhausted to create accounts in all of these apps and try them all out. I've got my Friend Tech, that's it. Coming out of the OP stack super chain base world, base has introduced pessimism, which is an open source monitoring system designed to enhance security of base. Hilariously named as well, of course, not optimism. It's the right way to view this. It's a monitoring system for like, think of it as like a second line of defense. So post someone attempting to exploit you, whatever that means, smart contracts, the actual protocol, et cetera. This is an alert system after that fact. So there's like three different subsystems here. There's like a risk engine, alerting system, and then just another system that's responsible for parsing and transforming real time data. Basically trying to give you a live alerts of like, hey, some shenanigans is going on. And it's just a monitoring system. And all OP stack chains can benefit from this, right? That's a really cool thing. This is kind of like, it has previously been deployed in other contexts. We've seen other projects like this. But the cool thing about this is base is building this to protect the base chain for their base users. It's just like extra protection for all base users. And it's really important because that's Coinbase. But since it's on the OP stack, all OP stack chains can also leverage this open source system. So this is about everything growing in security all at once. We like it. We like it. Binance is interesting. Speaking of base, Binance is now supporting base as well. So you can withdraw a deposit from Binance to base. I wonder if that has any implications for the future of BNB chain, David. Right. That's the big question is like now with base, the BNB chain of the West, if you will. What is the future of BNB chain? That's always in a boat. Do you think BNB chain just becomes a roll up at some point? I would, I can only hope. Like, you know, why be a side chain? And in this, in this economy, why be a silo when you could join in the crowd? This is a Fred Wilson post. Fred Wilson is a notable venture capitalist, Union Square Ventures. I followed his blog post for a while. I just noticed this week. On September 9th, he's writing on the 27th, but on September 9th, apparently he was the victim of a phishing attack. So he got over 40 of his NFTs stolen, some of his most valuable NFTs, 46 to be exact. And it was because I believe he was in a crypto wallet. He doesn't mention the wallet, but I'm guessing it was probably like a Coinbase wallet. He received a message, maybe a message from XMTP telling him to click this link. He says this, while waiting for our luggage, I got a push notification. I guess he was at the airport. So distracted, you know, waiting for your luggage, just got a few minutes on your phone in my wallet about an NFT drop that I could participate in. So I click the link, sign the transaction and nothing happened. So I tried again. Again, nothing happened. Frustrated. I turned my attention to the luggage, retrieved it and got in the car. On the way home, I tried again a few more times. Turns out that each of my failed attempts to make an NFT was a scam that allowed a thief to eventually take 46 of my most valuable NFTs. Dave, we were just talking about this last week with Mark Cuban getting drained from similar kind of phishing scam. It's unfortunate. Yeah. Do you have a take on this? There is some good news at the end, but do you have a take on this first? I have two takes. One is that you should not be having your wallet with 46 of your most valuable NFTs be your mobile wallet that you have on your phone. So if you do that right now, stop doing that immediately. Don't sign things that also ought to be your cold storage. Yes. Have your cold storage a separate wallet completely from your active wallet that you do this kind of activity on. My other take is that we should be able to sign messages with our cold storage and not get rugged. We should do both. Well, how do we do the second there? I don't know. That call for startups. Actually, delegate.cash, Fubar's project is working on this, but still. There are a number of attempts. It's something we definitely have to solve because this is not good user experience to get drained of all of your funds because you clicked the wrong link. And by the way, just the PSA is even the pros can get rugged like this. Even the pros. Actually, Anthony Cissano had a similar event that he talked about in the Daily Guay earlier this week. If it can happen to someone like Fred or Anthony, it can happen to anybody. David, what did Michael Saylor do last week? What does Michael Saylor do every week, Ryan? He purchases Bitcoin. Also, all that Bitcoin ether strength ratio, that was because Michael Saylor was buying a bunch of Bitcoin. Oh, really? Good for him. This has happened like three times now. Like, Bitcoin ether shows strength and then it was Saylor. Purchased 5,445 Bitcoin for almost $150 million. Where does he get all this money? Wait, he just spent another $150 million on Bitcoin? Yes, yes, yes. That's exactly right. He's borrowing it from bondholders. Yeah, but everyone runs out of margin. If you run out of capital, sure, you take leverage and then sometimes you run out of margin. Anyways, he's at 0.75% of the $21 million. He almost owns one full percent of all Bitcoin in existence. Over three quarters of one percent, yeah. He is down 8% in dollar terms on his Bitcoin buy. He is so tenacious about this. It's impressive. And I've always said, I think he'll do well on it eventually. Yeah, eventually. I think he'll do very well. He has bought a total of $4.7 billion of Bitcoin and that is currently worth $4.3 billion of Bitcoin. David, Chase Bank is banning crypto payments. Why? What's going on? Why? I don't know. They just say that our policy around crypto is changing. Here's what it means for you. If we think you're making a payment related to crypto assets, we'll decline it. But customers are free to use a different bank or provider to invest in crypto. That's called being unbanked. You're just... I got one of these letters from Bank of America one time with one of my accounts that just saw me transferring into Coinbase and they sent me a letter and they said, you're too risky. Bye. Right. They say, here's why they do it, fraudsters are increasingly using crypto assets to steal large sums of money from people who are committed to helping keep our customers' money safe and secure. So they're saying that because people are losing money in crypto, that they're not going to let you buy crypto, which the evidence is that, yes, people are sadly being phished all the time. We have been talking about this. Does that mean that you just closed down the gates to buying crypto? That's a reach. I also think that this is maybe Operation Choke Point hitting the UK. The same kind of effect here of big banks saying, no, we will, if you're dealing crypto, we will unbank you. Back to the Novogratz tweet earlier in this episode, right? Of, you know, of companies getting unbanked as a result of this. David, another Ethereum address was just added to the OFACT sanction list. This time, the Sinaloa cartel. This is a fentanyl trafficking operation in a Colombian cartel leader, apparently. So added to the OFACT sanction list. I don't think that this is going to stop, by the way. Of course, Bankless is no friend of drug cartels. You'll know that. But it does set a bad precedent, I think, if this is not handled correctly. This is actually a GitHub maintained by ultrasound money of all addresses, Ethereum addresses that are on the OFACT sanction list. You see this? Twenty-one of them. Yeah, twenty-one of them. Twenty-one. Oh, there's Roman Semenov. Roman Semenov's on here. With eight addresses. Wow. Twenty-one entities have been added to the OFACT sanction list right now. And I don't know, I'm like not a friend of drug cartels, but am worried about this black list type of capability that the US is growing in scope. And I guess I have a few takes on this. One, I don't think we're going to get out of this. I think they're going to continue to add bad guys to this list. So that's going to be with us always. But I feel like we need to hold the line in some specific places. One is they can't be sanctioning privacy smart contracts as they have with tornado cash. It's a general purpose privacy tool. You can't add that to the OFACT sanction list. And I know we're battling that in the court system right now. I'm also worried about increased demands to AML, KYC, all of DeFi, all front ends. And to have them essentially have to check the OFACT sanction list before they can serve up the DeFi in the user interface and application. So I'm worried about this, I guess I would say. I don't really have a solution other than there's got to be some places we hold the line here. And yeah, I don't know if you have any wisdom for this, David. Do you ever think we'll see bankless.eth on there? Better not. Well, what are you doing? What are you doing with our private keys, man? Nothing, bro. They're coming for me. Well, it's fine when it's all bad guys on the list, I guess. That's the point I'm making. That's the point. When does bankless narrative become enemy of the state? Well, there's already some people who, I mean, we certainly argue are not bad guys. Like a tornado cache is on this list, Roman Semenov is on this list, open source privacy developer. Eight addresses he has on this list. So that is not comforting. David, we've got a new wallet, though. On to brighter news. What's this? New browser extension out of the Rainbow wallet. Rainbow is definitely a beloved wallet in the space, I would say. It's been a mobile wallet. They've been pioneering mobile, but now they are entering the world of being a wallet extension. I'm actually doing a show with Mike from Rainbow on Friday. He's a local Williamsburg resident. We will still be doing it over. Oh, you're not doing it in person? Yeah, we have to do share screen. It's a virtual product. He's got to show you some stuff, I get it. How about raises of the week, David? What do we got? One raise from Bankless Ventures out of this week. Again, this is the way that we do this. Whenever Bankless Ventures makes an investment, we talk about it here in the weekly roll up as the inception of a conflict of interest so y'all can know about it. And it also gives us a moment to explain why we invested in the raise. The raise this week is Phoenix, Phoenix spelled with an F-F-H-E-N-I-X. This is privacy. This is encryption and privacy on the blockchain and we're just leading the charge of investing in more of these things because there needs to be more privacy in the world of crypto. So there's a $7.5 million seed round dedicated to bring fully amorphic encryption to a layer two on Ethereum and overall just pushing the frontier of F-H-E fully homomorphic encryption into the world of crypto. So this is, I think stands in contrast to Z-K cryptography, which is the more commonly known form of privacy. Interestingly, privacy and scalability are actually two sides of the same coin. So you get Z-K roll ups, which are hyperscalable, but you also get Z-K, Z-K roll ups like ASEC, which are private. This is a different strategy for producing privacy. Fully homomorphic encryption existed before crypto. It's just general cryptography, not cryptocurrency. But now we are imbuing it into a layer two for it to have fully encrypted data. So the way that Z-K roll ups work or Z-K in general is that you generate a proof off chain and then you put the proof on chain and then everyone's like, yeah, that's the correct proof it checks out. Fully homomorphic encryption operates differently. It's more just like all the data, all the state is parsable because all the state is present on chain. So it's a more rich state of data that's just encrypted. So you can run compute on it when it's in its encrypted form. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So it's more composable because the state of things is all hosted locally on chain. It's all present and accounted for. It's just encrypted. And so more composability, more utility out of this kind of say a new approach, an alternative approach to the Z-K space, potentially more scalable. Well, we need more privacy solutions specifically on layer two. And last fun fact, this was founded by two guys. And I mean that literally. Damn it. I was going to give this joke. I front ran you, David. All of that stuff was interesting. But the real reason why we invested in this deal is because the two co-founders are Guy and Guy. It's just too good. If that's not bullish, I don't know what is. David, what do we have coming up next? Coming up next, will ETFs push crypto values away? Are they coming to infiltrate and corrupt crypto? We'll talk about that. Also, another take, are we at the peak ignorance of crypto? Are we in the peak ignorance phase of the market, I think possible. And then also, is Ethereum a technology absorbing black hole? There is, I think, seven takes this week. I think it's a whole entire section of this week. So good. They're all so good. So big, big takes. Big take section this week as we're going to get to all that and more. But first, I want to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Mantle, formerly known as Bitdao, is the first Dow led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network, a brand new high performance Ethereum layer two built using the OP stack, but uses Eigen layers data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum layer one. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility, providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub communities from around Web3 onboarded, like Game7 for Web3 gaming and Bybit for TVL and liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow led layer two ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at 0xmantle. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum one with flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub and social dapps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now Arbitrum Orbit allows you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own layer three, giving you access to interoperable customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, enterprise or user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar and fully EVM compatible, faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. So visit arbitrum.io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be secure, fast, cheap and friction free. Here's a question of the week from a bankless citizen Kiwi dog. When the Bitcoin and ETH ETFs are finally approved, are you worried that the wacky but value oriented crypto culture, which I love so much, is going to be overrun by a rush of new people who have large amounts of power in the existing system? David, are all these TradFi people going to erode the crypto values that make us special, make this whole thing decentralized, make this whole thing corruption resistant? Should we be worried about the ETFs from that perspective? Yeah, I actually wrote a blurb about this in one of my David's takes articles, The Last Crypto Cycle is here, where I talked about Bitcoin ETFs and also Bitcoin Ethereum ETFs and also running through getting regulatory clarity like we are currently battling with regulators. We will get clarity one way or another, eventually Bitcoin and ETFs will be approved. So there's this growing east of crypto, if you will, like the civilized law abiding regulated civilization of the east of crypto that is growing, we are watching that grow. Will we be able to retain the freedom of the West? I think by default, absolutely, because private keys are permissionless, everything is a bare asset. The West is the default in the world of crypto. The East has to be built. So that is actually an inverse in the historical corollary where people show up in the East, they're moving West to go away from Britain and the monarchy and then they've established their own civilization. But then people keep on going West because they're inherently looking for freedom always. So as civilization is born, they keep going West. Crypto is the Wild West and it always has been and always will be because we have freedom and private keys and power and responsibility and opportunity imbued into us by default. That is like the substrate that crypto exists upon. Will it be encroached? Well, with ETFs, people are buying Ether, Bitcoin through their ETFs, but they're staying in the trad world. That capital is staying trad, that's staying in Fidelity. They're also buying a worse product. Yes, and they're free to do that. And so actually the line between trad-fi and defi will definitely be retained. Defi will just be the permissionless version of finance. And all that ETFs do is actually wraps Ether, kind of like wrapped Ether, and then makes it composable inside of trad-fi. But it actually is us – we're corrupting Wall Street. They should be worried about us. We're decentralizing them. Yeah, I know. I totally agree. I think this whole thing is one big Trojan horse and we got them. And I think that we've said this before, too. You can't build something decentralized on something centralized, right? But it's fine if you put something centralized on something decentralized, so long as the base layer is preserved, right? And that's why we are so passionate about the layer one and the layer zero, which is kind of the social community, keeping those layers decentralized, all right? Our validator set matters so much, right? Making sure that the entire block building, you know, searching, building, validating, like chain, is corruption-free and censorship-resistant, right? That's the stuff that matters. So who cares what they build that's centralized on top of those layers, so long as those layers remain decentralized and corruption-resistant and quote, unquote, pure. That's what we care the most about. With the Ether ETFs, Ether gets sucked up into TradFi, ETH price goes up, and they add jet fuel to the values that power up crypto. They adopt crypto protocols. They adopt crypto values. Shouldn't I do a song? Chris Berninsky, Eclipse is like a Solana embassy in Ethereum nation. Just take from Chris Berninsky. Give us some background on Eclipse first. So Eclipse is the predicted outcome, I think, of the rollup-centric roadmap thesis, which is that new and alternative non-EVM execution environments can turn themselves into a layer 2 and settle on Ethereum and benefit from Ethereum's network effects and composability and liquidity and assets. Eclipse we did the show not too long ago. Eclipse is Solana's Solana virtual machine as a layer 2, and so Chris is putting this into nation-state metaphors, which I so wholly appreciate, and he's saying Eclipse is like a Solana embassy on the Ethereum nation. So like a little domicile for Solana on Ethereum, and he follows up and says, Eclipse will further trade relations between two of crypto's major economies, cementing the importance of ETH and Sol as a means of trade production and consumption. That is his take. That is his take. That is Chris's take. I do agree with you. That is Chris's take. Yeah. You can see my take, my response to Chris's take. Oh, did you say something? Yeah. Well, kind of. Om nom nom. I said, om nom nom nom nom nom, which is my version of saying Ethereum is just gobbling up Solana. So it's not the Solana embassy coming to Ethereum, it's just Ethereum just absorbing it and digesting it. Well, that brings us to the next take, which is this one from not you, but swagtamous.eth. The beauty of Ethereum is that it's a technology-absorbing black hole. EVMs, layer 2s, optimistic rollups, CK rollups, SNARKs, Starks, SVM, that's the Solana virtual machine. It doesn't matter. Everything ends up in Ethereum eventually. Ethereum's culture and draw is just too strong, and once you're caught up in it, there's no going back. So embassy versus black hole, two different analogies here for something similar. Yeah. Do you have anything to add to this? So this one is swag's take, but it's also my take as well, because I 100% agree with this. I have my own version of this tweet all the way back in 2019. You can understand this from first principles. Open source code aggregates. Better open source code depends on to better open source code, and Ethereum is a platform for open source code. So we've seen this play out before. Do you remember EOS turned into Loom Network? Well, neither of those ideas worked, so they both just died. But Zcash, that's Aztec on Ethereum as a layer 2, like we have that technology. Like all of these things, useful open source cryptocurrency related code can just append on to Ethereum, and then Ethereum grows. So sure, it's an embassy for now, but then it's just going to get gobbled. Yeah, I think that the black hole analogy is good. I would also just use the gravity, the gravitational pull analogy is good. And I would use like a star or a sun type of metaphor. If you are a layer 1 with a monetary unit and massive liquidity and massive economic bandwidth and a culture of innovation, then you're just going to suck in all of the other stellar objects towards you, and they're going to start orbiting you. And so the goal, I mean, this is the Bankless thesis, is to become the most massive star in your ecosystem. Maybe there'll be a binary star system, though, David, that's what some others would say. Binary star systems work when two equivalently sized stars about within some range start like having a dance with each other. But if there's an imbalance between these two stars, one just gobbles up the other. Bitcoin and Ethereum, is that a binary star system? I would currently call that a binary star system. Maybe we are stretching the metaphor too far. But this is another take from Brenner. We told you we got a lot this week. Given the concept of soulmate, there's probably a similar buildmate. Someone where the two of you enjoy building or creating stuff together, the creations will be stellar and the two of you will have so much fun doing it. Oh, this is a sweet one. Who put this in the agenda? A buildmate. Find your buildmate. You got your soulmate. Yeah. It reminds me of the bear market buddy take. Everything is just easier in crypto when you have a buddy. Find your buildmate. This is very heartwarming. It's a good time to find your buildmate too. Fun fact, I went to college with Brenner. Oh, really? Yeah. I feel like you always say that. Like every show, it's just like some random person. You went to college? This is what happens when you go outside, Ryan.
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"Who was it? And he said, well, I found the hearing itself to be pretty toothless and that most Congress people wanted mostly to get sound bites. That's what we saw a little bit is still nice to see that Gensler's prejudice against crypto are not shared by all of the legislative branch. And next, they met with some of the congressional leaders. So Richie Torres, Mark Molinaro, Hakeem Jeffries, several more. And Kevin goes on. Some lines that we'll pull out here. Kevin Owocki says the White House doesn't like crypto, but no one really seems to know why. As far as I know, no one with stand with crypto was able to meet with the executive branch. So they're still not engaging in the executive branch. Yeah. He says quote of the day was from Mike Novogratz, who is also there. The extra legal de-banking of crypto companies is the most un-American thing I've ever seen. Hard agree. Quote of the day. Yeah. He says this dank of SPF seems to have mostly lifted. The opportunists who use SPF and FTX implosion to advance their agenda last year have already played their hands already. Wow. Nice. And then the last thing I'll pull out here is Kevin says it was cool to sit shoulder to shoulder pushing for regulatory clarity with prominent, prominent crypto luminaries like Brian Armstrong, Ryan Selkis, Mike Novogratz, or Fred Arisam. And then, of course, he finishes with the action item of call your congressman. This is not just him saying, hey, you should do this. This is saying, hey, this is what is the most effective. This is the advice that I've gotten from people in Congress who I just talked to. Call your congressman. If you don't know who or how to approach them, you can check out Coinbase's guide at www.standwithcrypto.org. So that is your big action item bankless listener for the week. Literally, five minutes. Five minutes of your time. Go to standwithcrypto.org and just press the buttons and then call your congressman. Sorry. You might have to be a US citizen for this one. So sorry to all our international users, but we're fighting America, you know, in America for this for sure. David, speaking of America, what's more American than Walmart? We got pudgy penguins on the shelves. What happened this week? 2,000 Walmart stores have put pudgy penguin like stuffed animals on their shelves. So this is a big co-marketing push between pudgy penguins and Walmart. Walmart even tweeted out the pudgy penguins, like retweeted and showed their, added their own quote to the pudgy penguins like animation about pudgy penguins being in Walmart. I mean, this is probably the biggest distribution event for any NFT ever. Can you describe what you're actually talking about? So you're not just talking about the NFTs, of course, in case it wasn't obvious. You're talking about stuffed animals. Pudgy penguin stuffed animals. Oh my God, they're so cute. Do you have a pudgy penguin, David, still? No, I sold mine. I sold yours. I bought him the shit out of that. I took a long bet on cool cats and sold pudgies and that was the wrong trade. No cool cats at Walmart. Well, pudgies was an interesting project because it got like resold to somebody else, right? Yeah, right. So the founders sold it to this guy, Luca, who I think has just been doing absolutely bad work. Is that the guy in the video? Is that this guy? I don't, I don't know if that's him, but yeah, he's been doing a killer job executing. He's coming from the old world of IP and IP growth. So pudgy penguin toys cost between $3 and $12, depending on the toy. Okay. The crazy thing about this is each toy has, I think one of those RFID chips in there. And so each toy has its own identity as an NFT on zk-sync era where people can build their forever pudgy characters inside of the pudgy world, their digital social platform. So you know, mini games interact with others and then you get like some certain like traits. There's like this on chain component where every single animal has a life on zk-sync era. Big win for zk-sync era. Really cool. It's really cool altogether. I mean, we have a, you know, an NFT that's redeemable for some sort of token representation on a layer two zk-evm layer two. IRL versus metaverse connection. Yeah, I love it. NFTs in Walmart is somehow fitting in the spare market. We are down bad, but actually I'm incredibly bullish. I mean, this is the big potential for NFTs is really as a kind of a brand, you know, in some ways a headless brand, in some ways like a kind of a, you know, a centralized led brand. So are you going to get one of these stuffed animals? Are they cute enough? Or are you just interested in the speculation aspect, David? I'm not necessarily a collector of stuffed animals, but I do think there is some like interesting dichotomy of like crypto degens owning pudgy penguins and then like children thinking that that's their favorite stuffed animal because it is like, that's a funny thing of, I don't know. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Oh, look at this. Some of them are getting swept. So looks like it's not just for children. Looks like some of the NFT, well, that's, this is Luca. This is the CEO of pudgy penguins. He's buying his own piranhas. He probably put that on the company card. That's an easy yield farming pudgies right now.
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"This is Gary Gensler in MIT world talking about crypto. And he brings in his brother, identical twin brother, Rob, who I think at the time is working at TiVo Price. Okay, so like the person that you see on your screen is Gary Gensler. Now watch closely, because you might lose him, because there's two of them. This is Rob. That's Gary. That's Rob Gensler. Oh wow, Rob. Rob. What's this shit? What do you think Rob thinks about crypto, David? Do you think he's like a big crypto fan? That'd be hard to go in public as a crypto fan. Like Mr. Smith from the Matrix, there's like two of them. It's funny, but yeah, didn't know about that. So a big reveal. That is nuts. Gary Gensler's twin, identical brother, that is maybe pro-crypto. I want to meme that into existence. We should get Rob on the podcast. There's a Horcrux joke here somewhere. Well, to fight these forces of Gensler-ness in DC, crypto showed up. Crypto showed up on Capitol Hill this week. So what are we looking at? Coinbase has organized this stand with crypto day, where just a bunch of crypto founders and leaders and policy advocates came to Capitol Hill to advocate for crypto conveniently at the same time that Gensler was in his hearing. Coincidence? I think not. So 50 plus founders from over 15 different states all visited DC. And so this was not just like people visiting, this was a big push. This was a policy and advocacy push. Here is Brian Armstrong on Yahoo Finance getting interviewed. I thought it was a great little clip. Yeah, so Stand With Crypto is here to tell people that 52 million Americans have now used crypto. That's 3x the number that own electric vehicles. It's more than hold union cards in the United States. It's a massive constituency. And they're frankly a little unhappy with the US because the US is lagging behind. We don't have clear rules on the books like 83% of the rest of the G20 countries for how crypto should be regulated, how consumers should be protected, and how this innovation can happen here in the US. And so there's a couple of bills going through the house right now that have bipartisan support for how we get clear market structure, how we get stable coins in the US. And these entrepreneurs and the 52 million Americans really want this to happen. And so we're here talking about Stand With Crypto. We've got the pins. People can check out StandWithCrypto.org and sign up if they want to be a crypto advocate. This is something America needs to get right. The pins, of course, are the shields. The shield pins. And he's got these talking points absolutely rehearsed, comparing them to other constituents that people totally can resonate with and vibe with on an emotional level, which is the right way to do this. Yeah. It's actually pretty cool. Brian also said this. I guess maybe he gave a speech on a panel, at least a statement on a panel. And he talks about Hayden Adams, the entrepreneurs, as he was referencing that clip. Hayden Adams of Uniswap is an American hero. And I mean that literally he's the kind of person that any country in the world would kill to have building the future of technology. And Elizabeth Warren called him a shadowy super coder. He actually put that on his Twitter profile as a badge of honor. If that's what it means to be an innovator in this country, then I'm a shadowy super coder too. And it's despicable that anyone keeps attacking American heroes like this who are helping propel our economy and our freedom and the future of this country forward. That was a statement from Brian Armstrong. Great line. Great line. Of course, Hayden Adams on Twitter says, thanks, Brian Armstrong, thanks for the kind of words. So glad we have you in Coinbase standing with DeFi and fighting for the whole industry. Really I think that is what this represented as a symbol. We have 50 plus founders showing up the day Gary Gensler is getting a hearing to go meet in a coordinated fashion with talking points and just like PR and press. And they had this like armored car out there, this painted blue armored car that was all about, hey, money doesn't need to be driven around in armored cars in the year 2023. Let's upgrade the financial system saying that 87 percent of Americans think that we should upgrade our financial system and 52 million Americans own crypto. So there's obviously a wide base of support. That is the facts that Coinbase is coming to Capitol Hill with. And overall, it just was a the biggest show of force, a coordinated show of force of support for crypto on Capitol Hill on a day where, you know, it counted more than most. Yeah, that's real people. Right. And one of the shadowy super coders that showed up is our friend Kevin Owocki. He showed up in this cohort and this was actually a fantastic thread of his just takeaways. I think we should read a few of them. So this was his experience. He's one of 40 founders invited to D.C. in the stand with crypto day. And then he reiterates the stats that that you just gave. The first day of their session was watching Gary Gensler live. So they actually got to go into the congressional chambers and watch this live. And Kevin, it kind of explains why there was a stand with crypto. Yes, somebody was in there.
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"For you, the process of tokenization is what transforms a non-security transaction into a security transaction? Look, if the investing- I thought you were technology neutral. Oh, wow. He asked the question, David, that we've always wanted to ask. Okay. How about baseball cards? How about Pokemon cards and these securities? Ms. Wagner is like, yo, MIT version of Gary was pro-blockchain, but SEC Gary is anti-blockchain. And then Richie Torres is like, yo, is a Pokemon card a security? These people are listening to crypto Twitter. These are our things. The power of crypto Twitter is getting into Congress. Well, it's because it's distilled logic. Gary Gensler thinks that everything that is tokenized should be a security, and that is just an untenable position. That's an untenable position. He refuses to provide any clarity. We are not saying, on the crypto side, we are not saying that tokenized things can't be securities. There are things that are tokenized that can be securities. We're not taking the binary, every token is not a security. He is taking the binary, every token is a security. And he's got to defend that, and it's indefensible, or else Pokemon cards and Magic the Gathering cards and Pogs, and all of these things are securities. And it's so satisfying. I know this is just showboating. It's for the show. This is a carnival. It's for the show. I know that, but it's still- It's important. It's important, because each representative is trying to give scaffolding for their constituents to rally behind. And so even though nothing is getting done, we are just publicly, Gary is just having tomatoes thrown at him, and then he's going to go home and shower it off, and he's going to be totally fine. But the public is, these are scaffolding for the public to go around. It's also, I think this meme will spread, David. This clip, I've already seen it all over the place. It's spreading, kind of like the Gary hates Pokemon. And that's the best thing that we could expect. That's the best outcome that we could ... It's like we have memeable clips that are showing what a far scary Gensler is. Governing this country by meme. I guess that's what we're descending into here, but look at this. Did you see this? So in every one of these, this is the second time or third time that we've had one of these, Gary gets a few minutes to speak. He gets to say words. Opening statements. Opening statements. Someone in the back of the camera behind Gary pulled out the Coinbase stand with crypto shield logo icon, and was just flashing it, holding it there. In a different clip, you also see a stand with crypto bag. So Gary, while he's saying his statements about how crypto's full of frauds, there's a bunch of stand with crypto icons in the back. Great. Great stuff. Ironically, by the way, that's an NFT, which Gary Gensler probably thinks is a security. That is an NFT. You're totally right. I forgot about that. And if you contrast it to, remember in 2017, Janet Yellen, buy Bitcoin? It's not the first time this has happened. I interviewed that guy, by the way, on POV Crypto. Oh, the buy Bitcoin guy? Yeah, the buy Bitcoin guy. Why did he do that? What's his name? He's an urban guy. He's an urban guy. He's an urban guy. Pretty passionate then. Okay, so that was the Gary grilling in front of DC, and hopefully we get some clips. We get some memes. We get some arguments. We don't expect a lot to come from the lashing otherwise. Okay, we got to come back to the twin thing. So Gary Gensler has an identical twin. You have a video that proves this? Yes, there's a video.
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"And so there's a wide variety of subjects. There's actually, before we get into the crypto stuff, there was a lot of focus on climate change and capital markets around climate change. And it just seems so contrived. I was like really frustrated because like all the people that were bringing up like climate change, like they couldn't connect it to the SEC in any way. I'm like, why this? And so they just wanted to talk about climate change. Kind of. A little bit. It was a little bit forced. At least it felt forced to me. So it starts off with Pat McHenry, who always starts these things off. This is the second time we've done this, so I've seen this kind of rodeo for the second time now. So Patrick McHenry starts it off, grills Gary Gensler because he's a pro crypto person. So it always starts off with a bang. And then the baton is immediately passed to Maxine Waters, who dumbed down kisses. Yeah. So she's just like dousing water, like her last name on the whole thing, because Patrick McHenry starts off saying, I'm fed up and tired with Gary Gensler shenanigans. And then Maxine Waters goes, well, I'm fed up and tired with the opposite side of the aisle. And this immediately turns it into red versus blue. And so there was a lot of like red versus blue-ing about it. And so that was the start. And then it went into like 30 minutes of non-crypto stuff. All the good stuff happened at the end. So you had to wait to the very end where Warren, Torres, and Wagner. All right. What are we about to watch? So I think the first clip is Patrick McHenry. We're going to start with Patrick McHenry because he starts the whole thing off in a fantastic bow tie. You've got serious questions to answer to the public and to Congress, and we intend to get your compliance. We can do it the easy way or the hard way. Play an Eastwood. And you'll back. The ranking member is now recognized for five minutes. Wow. That really sets the tone. Yes. The ranking member is Maxine Waters. We're not going to play that because it's just dumb. We're only going to play the good stuff. Who's this? This is Mrs. Wagner. She is a big fan. I'm confused at which Gary Gensler, the American public, should believe? The academic version, who spoke glowingly about the power of technology to help more investors participate in US and global capital markets? Or the SEC version, who apparently thinks all use of any technology by broker-dealers and investment advisors is inherently conflicted and firms should just stop using technology altogether? Mr. Gensler, could you please briefly explain this change in your views? I thank you for the question, a clever question. It's the same Gary Gensler. It's not my identical twin brother, Rob, or anything. It's me. Wait. This is how I found out that Gary Gensler has an identical twin brother. We don't have that clip in the agenda, but I feel like now we have to actually bring that up. No, no, no. Okay. We need to talk about this. Gary Gensler actually has an identical twin brother. We don't have that in the agenda, but we'll go and pause and go get the clip, and then we'll do this after we do that. We need to hear more about Gary Gensler's twin brother. First the lashing, and then we'll talk about the Gary Gensler identical twin brother. This was the best one, though. This is my favorite clip, maybe the clip of the year that I've seen from Representative Richie Torres, who's actually been on the Bankless Podcast before. Let's play it. Suppose I were to purchase a Pokemon card. Would doing so constitute a security transaction? You can purchase a Pokemon card. I don't know what the context is, but if you're just purchasing a Pokemon card- If I purchase a Pokemon card, is that a security transaction? That's not a secure- Okay. If I were to purchase a tokenized Pokemon card on a digital exchange via a blockchain, is that a security transaction? I'd have to know more.
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"And I wouldn't even I'm not even sure I would use the word pleading. The first line in this article in this letter says, we write to ensure the SEC does not continue to discriminate against spot Bitcoin. We're not begging him. That is a heart. We hired him. That's a thing. He's not our king. Right. I always forget this. Like we he actually works for us and the people. He's part of the executive branch, but he works for the people. That's us. And Congress can rein him in. He operates under their legislation. And they said in this letter, following the Court of Appeals decision, there's no reason to continue to deny such applications under inconsistent and discriminatory standards. So that's Congress's take. And we're going to see a bit of the grilling that Gary takes in front of Congress in the next section. But one other thing this could mean, actually, David, is Ether Futures ETFs could be trading as early as Tuesday. This is all part of this government shutdown. Oh, we need to keep the government open until Tuesday. Well, the SEC is looking to speed things up in order to get it done before the looming shutdown. OK, so they might actually approve it before if they were going to approve it anyway. They'll just approve it before the government shuts down. So that could happen. So there could be a world where we actually have Ether Futures trading on Tuesday. We'll be talking about that next week if we do. Fun fact, the crypto volume, crypto volumes are like heavily favored towards futures as soon as futures have ever come about. So the Ether Futures, that's a big unlock. Yeah. Well, you think it's a good thing or bad thing? There's always that debate of whether when you have kind of big liquidity unlocks, whether people just hit sell or people hit buy or what happens in the short run. Right. OK, so why do people think that? Well, we got Bitcoin Futures ETF at the top of the market in 2017, and then we just proceeded to dump for 12 months. That was just a coincidence of the timing. I think it's just going to either do nothing or just amplify the trend that's already happening. More liquidity is bullish, and it's even more bullish when prices are low and liquidity is low. Like when you add liquidity to a low liquid market, prices go up fundamentally. All right. What's coming up next, David? Coming up next, Gary gets grilled in front of Congress again. We've clipped out some of the best moments so we can just all have our schadenfreude. Meanwhile, CryptoBites back. At the same time, Coinbase leads with their hashtag StandWithCryptoDay at Capitol Hill. So we got some pictures and coverage around that. Kevin Owocki gave some great takes. A lot of friends and family were all out there. Penguins are in Walmart. PudgyPenguins lands a big deal with Walmart. We'll talk about the nuances and details behind that as well. All of this coming up more, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken, a preferred crypto exchange in 2023. If you do not have an account with Kraken, consider clicking the link in the show notes to get one today. Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry, the place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Kraken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and a nifty new modular interface. Kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen. With Kraken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Kraken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit pro.kraken.com to get started today. Celo is the mobile first EVM compatible carbon negative blockchain built for the real world. And now something big is happening. Introducing the Celo Layer 2. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Celo's rapidly growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared his excitement for the Celo Layer 2 on the Celo Forum, so has Ben Jones from Optimism. But why? The Celo Layer 2 will bring huge advantages like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one-block finality. What does all that mean? Rock-solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on Celo have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the Celo Layer 2, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas using ERC-20 tokens. But Celo is a community-governed protocol. This means that Celo needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Celo Forum. Follow at Celo.org on Twitter and visit Celo.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Gary Gensler under pressure this week in front of Congress. He was grilled, I would say. We got some clips coming up, but he testified before the House Financial Services Committee. And Republicans, I would say, are increasingly apoplectic about the more than 40 rules Gensler has been proposing lately, especially now that the market is adopting them. And he's been blamed for kneecapping U.S. capital markets. And some of the discussion was actually about crypto as well. And some guests made some appearances, particularly some pro-crypto legislators asking some questions of Mr. Gensler. David, you actually did this for us. You live-streamed this whole entire event and you helped curate the clips that we're about to watch. What were your takes as you were watching this event unfold? Is it just like watching C-SPAN? Is it boring? Yeah, so everyone in the Senate Finance, the House Finance Committee gets to have their like five minutes where they just talk and they ask Gary questions.
Bankless
"deepfakes" Discussed on Bankless
"Miss Wagner is like, yo, MIT version of Gary was pro-blockchain, but SEC Gary is anti-blockchain. And then Richie Torres is like, yo, it's a Pokemon card of security? These people are listening to crypto Twitter. They are like, these are our things. The power of crypto Twitter is like getting into Congress. Well, it's because it's distilled logic. I mean, Bankless Nation, it is the last Friday of September. David, what time is it? It's the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup Ryan where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless into the frontier this week with a bunch of clips of Gary getting grilled. So everyone, everyone prepare for that one. If you're not listening to this with coffee, because it's too late in the day, well then you should get your popcorn, because that is what you will need. I mean, this is a catharsis, I think, for many of you in this episode. You'll enjoy this very much. Also, crypto was present in Washington this week. Yeah, Coinbase's stand with crypto day was held at Capitol Hill the same day that Gensler was giving testimony in front of Congress. Convenient. What about the timing of that? David, what else we got? After that, we'll talk about pudgy penguins in Walmart landing a huge deal, a ton of distribution for pudgy penguins, also with each toy purchase having an on-chain identity on ZKSync. So we'll talk about that. And then after, also not only are penguins getting identity, but citizens of Buenos Aires perhaps also getting some on-chain presence as well. We'll talk about that. And then, of course, we're going to do the PSA of deepfakes and phishing attacks that are out there. We got a Vitalik deepfake that we want to show you. It's pretty hilarious, but not if you believe it. Notable VC Fred Wilson got phished for 40 NFTs this week. So if Fred Wilson can get phished, so can you. We will talk about this and more. What else we got, Ryan? You know, the usual Bitcoin ETF stuff. ETH might be getting futures. There's a ton to talk about every week. This is a bullish week, I think. I'm declaring it such, David. It is a bullish week. And we got some green candles when we get to the markets. But before we get in, David, we got a message from our friends and sponsors over at Layer Zero. What do they want the folks at home to know? They want you to know that after a year, over a year of combined effort, Layer Zero and Google Cloud have announced their partnership, and they are ready to build the interoperable cross-chain apps of the future. What is Layer Zero? Of course, Layer Zero is a set of smart contracts that are deployed on every single chain. These smart contracts connect to each other. How do they connect to each other? Well, they need some Oracle service in the center to be the chatterboxes, the passing messages between all of the Layer Zero smart contracts across all of the 50 different chains. Google Cloud is that new default Oracle. That is the partnership that they have created. So there is a link in the show notes for you to go explore more if you're a builder who wants to build on Layer Zero. LayerZero.network is also the URL. Well, you know what I want to learn more about this week, David, is markets. Tell me about the old markets. I think, I think, I haven't looked at this yet, but I think we got some green on the week. We got some green, dude. Let's look at the Bitcoin charts first. What's Bitcoin showing us? Some single digit green. Look at that green right on the right. That's your dose of dopamine for this week. It's like, whoo, Bitcoin up 2%, whopping 2%. Started the week at 26,600, ending the week at, well, Thursday morning, if you call it the end of the week. It's not the end of the week. 27,150, up 2%. Ether price up a little bit more, starting the week at 1660, up 4.5% to the current price, excuse me, starting the week at 1560, ending the week at right around 1660, where we are right now. 1660. I mean, it's still low. That is a low price. We are getting excited about very little right now. Yeah. It's up such a small degree, you shouldn't even be excited about this. And yet we are. Yeah, we are. 4.5% on the week, I'll tell you. It's better than flat. When's the last time we had a double digit week, man? Double digit up or down? Up. I can't remember either, actually. We've been in the flatlands for so long. It's just like kind of a little bit of a bleed out all the way from 1900. Weren't we over 2000 a few weeks ago? Yeah, we have touched over 2000 in this bear market, but man, it certainly doesn't feel like it. Last time we were at 2K was July. In July, briefly. We weren't at 2K. Yeah, I can't remember July. Well, I was in the mountains. It's been downhill ever since I caught back for the mountains. Yeah, it really was. It's been all downhill since you guys. The only thing you can do, David, is go to the mountains. Bad things happen to Gary Gensler when you go to the mountains. Although, I guess nothing bad happened to him this week. Anyway, I'm skipping too far ahead. We'll have our Gary later in the episode. ETH, Bitcoin, up 2%. Total crypto market cap, $1.11 trillion. Layer 2 scaling factor, touched 6% this week, down to 5.5%. Still at all-time highs. Layer 0. Wait, what touched 6%? Excuse me, not 6%. Total value loss? 6x. 6x is what I meant. Oh, activity. That's what you like to look at. Yes, layer 2 activity touched 6x of Ethereum, but now it's at 5.69. Nice. 60 transactions per second, 64 transactions per second. Yeah, that's where we get the 6x. We got more transactions per second left in this tank, I think. Oh, yeah. David, you want to talk about the general markets, like all the TradFi markets? You want to talk about macro really quick, because it's been super confusing to me. It's been super confusing. And then I read this tweet. We're also doing a macro show on Tuesday as well. So a macro show, so talking about the state of macro from a crypto person, so it's a crypto person who understands macro, so I'm really excited for that show. Are you a crypto person that understands macro, David? Do you understand macro? When I have a smarter macro person with me, then yes, I understand macro. My question to you is, does anybody really understand macro, particularly right now? Oh, you mean current snapshot? Definitely not. Yeah, all right. So here's the tweet. Current situation. One, stocks are falling like a recession is coming. Two, oil prices are rising like there's no recession in sight. That's contradictory. Three, interest rates are rising like we have 10% inflation. Yes, they are. Four, gold is falling like inflation is gone. Five, housing prices are rising like rates are falling. And six, commercial real estate is falling like it's 2008. Nothing adds up here. That's the way I feel about macro right now. It's very confusing. There is a confusing set of signals going on, and it's not adding up in my head. What do you think about this? Yeah, they follow through, and they say it's beginning to feel like a pivot point in sentiment. I don't know if I'm about to say what I think they are meaning by this, but when there's a bunch of confusion, people, I think, brace for something, brace for clarity, and then whatever that clarity is will define sentiment. Where are we going? We don't know. As soon as we find out, we'll know how we feel about it. But we know it's going to be different from here. Different good or different bad? Those are the only two directions. Yeah, I guess that's the reductive take about it. But it's basically like we don't really know. That's why I'm very interested in doing this macro episode next week to see what the newest macro person kind of knows. I will say one thing, though. I think volatility is back on the menu. I think that's what this means. Because when the market doesn't know what direction it's going to go in, then it can kind of lurch in one direction or the other. So weird macro climate right now. On the back of stimulus, on the back of money printing, like what's going on here? And just to be clear about something, we've previously talked about stocks being at all time highs. That's been kind of the theme of the last two months, I would say. Well, so from looking at the SPY, you don't have the chart up, but it has declined by 7% since July. So the SPY is down 7%, which is more. That goes to the first bullet point. Stocks are falling like a recession is coming up. I don't know. It's down 7%, just doesn't feel like a lot to me. Well, in the trade market, 7% is a lot historically, but not recently. 7% in the trade market is actually, that's just like, trade markets are also volatile. OK, well, we'll try to make sense of this, but let's get back to crypto. This is a negative report from JP Morgan, who said, Ethereum's activity post-Shanghai that was the last hard fork back in March, has been disappointing. JP Morgan calling Ethereum's progress disappointing. They've got some reasons for this. While the shift from proof of work to proof of stake meant that the energy consumption from Ethereum collapsed by 99%, the Ethereum supply is shrinking and staking rose sharply by 50% since the Shanghai upgrade. While that happened, the increase in network activity has been rather disappointing. Ethereum's daily transactions, daily active addresses, and total value locked on DeFi protocols on the network have all experienced declines since the last hard fork. So JP Morgan, their analysts expressing some bearishness here over the last six months or so. Yes. I'm not mad, just disappointed with that activity. My response to that is, who the hell are you? JP Morgan doesn't know how to analyze these things. Well, I don't know. Ethereum post-Shanghai activity, it's just the broader crypto downturn. And also, they're just wrong, JP Morgan, he is wrong. They say layer twos have displayed mixed results. Well, no, TVL and economic activity on layer twos across the board are all up. I don't know where the hell they're getting their data from, but not only is their data wrong, but their analysis is poor. Well, let's go to the actual numbers, Stephen. Layer two beat provides a good source for value locked on layer twos. What are we looking at? At the 180-day time frame, it's basically flat. It's marginally up, it's basically flat. It's a flat TVL, $10.5 billion. Activity is up, it's up so much. It's unequivocally up by a lot. I'm disappointed in JP Morgan. Wow. Have you ever been not disappointed with JP Morgan, David? I'm generally disappointed by banking in general. Really? You should start a podcast called Bankless, David, about escaping your bank over time, slowly. I think Vance Spencer put that tweet in perspective as well. Actually, I don't think he was responding to that tweet in particular. But we are. We got some perspective here from Vance Spencer. This is Ethereum, if you chart it against some of the fastest growing tech companies in human history, companies like Alphabet was Google, of course, and Meta or Zoom or Microsoft, and how quickly, over time, it took them to surpass $10 billion in revenue. How long did it take them? It took Ethereum seven years. When charted against these other tech companies, there's only one that did that faster, and that is Google. Yeah. Ethereum really did all of its $10 billion of revenue inside of 2020 to 2023. I mean, so look at this line. It's just kind of like a slope line up. So I mean, doing pretty well, all things considered, JP Morgan. Not disappointing. I'm not disappointed by this. And I'm not disappointed. Also, long-term perspective, not disappointed in the price of ETH over the last seven years either. And we can keep going. Uniswap this week hit 300 million in swaps. 300 million unique trades, swaps, has happened on Uniswap. Uniswap was invented in 2019. 300 million swaps since 2019. Is that disappointing? Is that disappointing? I'm not disappointed by that in the slightest. I feel great about that. Maintain my disappointment about JP Morgan. You know, I think it's part of a broader crypto sentiment, and I've seen a lot of takes just in general in news, but even in financial analyst news like JP Morgan research, that sort of thing. It comes back down to this, David. Mainstream thinks that crypto is dead, again, like always. This always happens. And this is what makes this a buying opportunity, as with previous cycles. And when crypto 10x's the next cycle, don't let anybody tell you you didn't earn it. Because if you're buying here, when everyone is saying crypto is dead, it's never coming back. That they're disappointed. That's how you earn. It's so easy. The signals are just being laid at our feet right now. They really are. I tweeted something like that out, and somebody responded with this life cycle. What are we looking at here? Yeah, just like the cycle of the bull bear market. So in the top of the bull market, some crypto friend of you will tell you, a bankless listener, you're so lucky. I wish that I bought two. And then the crypto market will go down and be like, you're an idiot. I told you crypto was a scam. Yeah, so especially when they say the words disappointing, it's such an emotional word. It's kind of just playing into the readership. I don't know if JP Morgan is about that game. I mean, we're in the stage of the cycle where everyone thinks you're an idiot. And they told you it was a scam. And you can't talk about crypto at your family events or parties because you're just the crypto moron who knows nothing. And ha, ha, ha, SPF, FTX, that's so stupid. Scams, frauds, NFTs are such a joke. Well, granted, some of those things are actually true. Sure, sure. But if you're still in crypto and you know why you're here. And you're no longer buying the scams because you can identify them. And then you'll swing back to like, I am a genius. I am amazing. I am lucky. Or third parties will say you're lucky when that happens and you'll feel like a genius. You've been chewing glass for three years, but you know, you got lucky, though. You got lucky. How about the Bitcoin ETF, David? Here's a tweet from James Seyfert. What's this about? He just says that the SEC has come out super early and delayed the ARK Invest and 21 shares Bitcoin ETF filing. There wasn't a decision due until November 11th. And typically up until recently, the SEC has always gone up right up until the buzzer. But they decided to delay their decision on this earlier than usual. You know why? Partially? It's some speculation. It's because the government's about to shut down. The U.S. government's about to shut down. That's on Monday, right? On Monday? Yeah. So apparently if by Sunday night, this Sunday night, Congress doesn't reach some sort of compromise resolution, whatever agreement to keep the government running, then it shuts down yet again. I mean, how many times have we been through this? And so this is the SEC just getting ahead of that so that the stuff doesn't expire while the government shut down. And I guess, I don't know what would happen if the government shut down and these deadlines were missed. But maybe they would de facto be approved. I think that could be how it works. Is this some sort of pseudo oracle about how the SEC thinks that if we do go for a shutdown, we'll get shut down all the way until at least November 11th? I have no idea. I have no idea what this could mean. I do know this is good news. So Congress, both Democrats and Republican lawmakers, sent a letter to Gary Gensler pleading that he approve a spot Bitcoin ETF.
Bankless
A highlight from ROLLUP: Coinbase Crashes DC | Gary Grilled By Congress | Vitalik Deepfakes
"Miss Wagner is like, yo, MIT version of Gary was pro -blockchain, but SEC Gary is anti -blockchain. And then Richie Torres is like, yo, it's a Pokemon card of security? These people are listening to crypto Twitter. They are like, these are our things. The power of crypto Twitter is like getting into Congress. Well, it's because it's distilled logic. I mean, Bankless Nation, it is the last Friday of September. David, what time is it? It's the Bankless Friday Weekly Rollup Ryan where we cover the entire weekly news in crypto, which is always an ambitious endeavor, yet we persevere nonetheless into the frontier this week with a bunch of clips of Gary getting grilled. So everyone, everyone prepare for that one. If you're not listening to this with coffee, because it's too late in the day, well then you should get your popcorn, because that is what you will need. I mean, this is a catharsis, I think, for many of you in this episode. You'll enjoy this very much. Also, crypto was present in Washington this week. Yeah, Coinbase's stand with crypto day was held at Capitol Hill the same day that Gensler was giving testimony in front of Congress. Convenient. What about the timing of that? David, what else we got? After that, we'll talk about pudgy penguins in Walmart landing a huge deal, a ton of distribution for pudgy penguins, also with each toy purchase having an on -chain identity on ZKSync. So we'll talk about that. And then after, also not only are penguins getting identity, but citizens of Buenos Aires perhaps also getting some on -chain presence as well. We'll talk about that. And then, of course, we're going to do the PSA of deepfakes and phishing attacks that are out there. We got a Vitalik deepfake that we want to show you. It's pretty hilarious, but not if you believe it. Notable VC Fred Wilson got phished for 40 NFTs this week. So if Fred Wilson can get phished, so can you. We will talk about this and more. What else we got, Ryan? You know, the usual Bitcoin ETF stuff. ETH might be getting futures. There's a ton to talk about every week. This is a bullish week, I think. I'm declaring it such, David. It is a bullish week. And we got some green candles when we get to the markets. But before we get in, David, we got a message from our friends and sponsors over at Layer Zero. What do they want the folks at home to know? They want you to know that after a year, over a year of combined effort, Layer Zero and Google Cloud have announced their partnership, and they are ready to build the interoperable cross -chain apps of the future. What is Layer Zero? Of course, Layer Zero is a set of smart contracts that are deployed on every single chain. These smart contracts connect to each other. How do they connect to each other? Well, they need some Oracle service in the center to be the chatterboxes, the passing messages between all of the Layer Zero smart contracts across all of the 50 different chains. Google Cloud is that new default Oracle. That is the partnership that they have created. So there is a link in the show notes for you to go explore more if you're a builder who wants to build on Layer Zero. LayerZero .network is also the URL. Well, you know what I want to learn more about this week, David, is markets. Tell me about the old markets. I think, I think, I haven't looked at this yet, but I think we got some green on the week. We got some green, dude. Let's look at the Bitcoin charts first. What's Bitcoin showing us? Some single digit green. Look at that green right on the right. That's your dose of dopamine for this week. It's like, whoo, Bitcoin up 2%, whopping 2%. Started the week at 26 ,600, ending the week at, well, Thursday morning, if you call it the end of the week. It's not the end of the week. 27 ,150, up 2%. Ether price up a little bit more, starting the week at 1660, up 4 .5 % to the current price, excuse me, starting the week at 1560, ending the week at right around 1660, where we are right now. 1660. I mean, it's still low. That is a low price. We are getting excited about very little right now. Yeah. It's up such a small degree, you shouldn't even be excited about this. And yet we are. Yeah, we are. 4 .5 % on the week, I'll tell you. It's better than flat. When's the last time we had a double digit week, man? Double digit up or down? Up. I can't remember either, actually. We've been in the flatlands for so long. It's just like kind of a little bit of a bleed out all the way from 1900. Weren't we over 2000 a few weeks ago? Yeah, we have touched over 2000 in this bear market, but man, it certainly doesn't feel like it. Last time we were at 2K was July. In July, briefly. We weren't at 2K. Yeah, I can't remember July. Well, I was in the mountains. It's been downhill ever since I caught back for the mountains. Yeah, it really was. It's been all downhill since you guys. The only thing you can do, David, is go to the mountains. Bad things happen to Gary Gensler when you go to the mountains. Although, I guess nothing bad happened to him this week. Anyway, I'm skipping too far ahead. We'll have our Gary later in the episode. ETH, Bitcoin, up 2%. Total crypto market cap, $1 .11 trillion. Layer 2 scaling factor, touched 6 % this week, down to 5 .5%. Still at all -time highs. Layer 0. Wait, what touched 6 %? Excuse me, not 6%. Total value loss? 6x. 6x is what I meant. Oh, activity. That's what you like to look at. Yes, layer 2 activity touched 6x of Ethereum, but now it's at 5 .69. Nice. 60 transactions per second, 64 transactions per second. Yeah, that's where we get the 6x. We got more transactions per second left in this tank, I think. Oh, yeah. David, you want to talk about the general markets, like all the TradFi markets? You want to talk about macro really quick, because it's been super confusing to me. It's been super confusing. And then I read this tweet. We're also doing a macro show on Tuesday as well. So a macro show, so talking about the state of macro from a crypto person, so it's a crypto person who understands macro, so I'm really excited for that show. Are you a crypto person that understands macro, David? Do you understand macro? When I have a smarter macro person with me, then yes, I understand macro. My question to you is, does anybody really understand macro, particularly right now? Oh, you mean current snapshot? Definitely not. Yeah, all right. So here's the tweet. Current situation. One, stocks are falling like a recession is coming. Two, oil prices are rising like there's no recession in sight. That's contradictory. Three, interest rates are rising like we have 10 % inflation. Yes, they are. Four, gold is falling like inflation is gone. Five, housing prices are rising like rates are falling. And six, commercial real estate is falling like it's 2008. Nothing adds up here. That's the way I feel about macro right now. It's very confusing. There is a confusing set of signals going on, and it's not adding up in my head. What do you think about this? Yeah, they follow through, and they say it's beginning to feel like a pivot point in sentiment. I don't know if I'm about to say what I think they are meaning by this, but when there's a bunch of confusion, people, I think, brace for something, brace for clarity, and then whatever that clarity is will define sentiment. Where are we going? We don't know. As soon as we find out, we'll know how we feel about it. But we know it's going to be different from here. Different good or different bad? Those are the only two directions. Yeah, I guess that's the reductive take about it. But it's basically like we don't really know. That's why I'm very interested in doing this macro episode next week to see what the newest macro person kind of knows. I will say one thing, though. I think volatility is back on the menu. I think that's what this means. Because when the market doesn't know what direction it's going to go in, then it can kind of lurch in one direction or the other. So weird macro climate right now. On the back of stimulus, on the back of money printing, like what's going on here? And just to be clear about something, we've previously talked about stocks being at all time highs. That's been kind of the theme of the last two months, I would say. Well, so from looking at the SPY, you don't have the chart up, but it has declined by 7 % since July. So the SPY is down 7%, which is more. That goes to the first bullet point. Stocks are falling like a recession is coming up. I don't know. It's down 7%, just doesn't feel like a lot to me. Well, in the trade market, 7 % is a lot historically, but not recently. 7 % in the trade market is actually, that's just like, trade markets are also volatile. OK, well, we'll try to make sense of this, but let's get back to crypto. This is a negative report from JP Morgan, who said, Ethereum's activity post -Shanghai that was the last hard fork back in March, has been disappointing. JP Morgan calling Ethereum's progress disappointing. They've got some reasons for this. While the shift from proof of work to proof of stake meant that the energy consumption from Ethereum collapsed by 99%, the Ethereum supply is shrinking and staking rose sharply by 50 % since the Shanghai upgrade. While that happened, the increase in network activity has been rather disappointing. Ethereum's daily transactions, daily active addresses, and total value locked on DeFi protocols on the network have all experienced declines since the last hard fork. So JP Morgan, their analysts expressing some bearishness here over the last six months or so. Yes. I'm not mad, just disappointed with that activity. My response to that is, who the hell are you? JP Morgan doesn't know how to analyze these things. Well, I don't know. Ethereum post -Shanghai activity, it's just the broader crypto downturn. And also, they're just wrong, JP Morgan, he is wrong. They say layer twos have displayed mixed results. Well, no, TVL and economic activity on layer twos across the board are all up. I don't know where the hell they're getting their data from, but not only is their data wrong, but their analysis is poor. Well, let's go to the actual numbers, Stephen. Layer two beat provides a good source for value locked on layer twos. What are we looking at? At the 180 -day time frame, it's basically flat. It's marginally up, it's basically flat. It's a flat TVL, $10 .5 billion. Activity is up, it's up so much. It's unequivocally up by a lot. I'm disappointed in JP Morgan. Wow. Have you ever been not disappointed with JP Morgan, David? I'm generally disappointed by banking in general. Really? You should start a podcast called Bankless, David, about escaping your bank over time, slowly. I think Vance Spencer put that tweet in perspective as well. Actually, I don't think he was responding to that tweet in particular. But we are. We got some perspective here from Vance Spencer. This is Ethereum, if you chart it against some of the fastest growing tech companies in human history, companies like Alphabet was Google, of course, and Meta or Zoom or Microsoft, and how quickly, over time, it took them to surpass $10 billion in revenue. How long did it take them? It took Ethereum seven years. When charted against these other tech companies, there's only one that did that faster, and that is Google. Yeah. Ethereum really did all of its $10 billion of revenue inside of 2020 to 2023. I mean, so look at this line. It's just kind of like a slope line up. So I mean, doing pretty well, all things considered, JP Morgan. Not disappointing. I'm not disappointed by this. And I'm not disappointed. Also, long -term perspective, not disappointed in the price of ETH over the last seven years either. And we can keep going. Uniswap this week hit 300 million in swaps. 300 unique million trades, swaps, has happened on Uniswap. Uniswap was invented in 2019. 300 million swaps since 2019. Is that disappointing? Is that disappointing? I'm not disappointed by that in the slightest. I feel great about that. Maintain my disappointment about JP Morgan. You know, I think it's part of a broader crypto sentiment, and I've seen a lot of takes just in general in news, but even in financial analyst news like JP Morgan research, that sort of thing. It comes back down to this, David. Mainstream thinks that crypto is dead, again, like always. This always happens. And this is what makes this a buying opportunity, as with previous cycles. And when crypto 10x's the next cycle, don't let anybody tell you you didn't earn it. Because if you're buying here, when everyone is saying crypto is dead, it's never coming back. That they're disappointed. That's how you earn. It's so easy. The signals are just being laid at our feet right now. They really are. I tweeted something like that out, and somebody responded with this life cycle. What are we looking at here? Yeah, just like the cycle of the bull bear market. So in the top of the bull market, some crypto friend of you will tell you, a bankless listener, you're so lucky. I wish that I bought two. And then the crypto market will go down and be like, you're an idiot. I told you crypto was a scam. Yeah, so especially when they say the words disappointing, it's such an emotional word. It's kind of just playing into the readership. I don't know if JP Morgan is about that game. I mean, we're in the stage of the cycle where everyone thinks you're an idiot. And they told you it was a scam. And you can't talk about crypto at your family events or parties because you're just the crypto moron who knows nothing. And ha, ha, ha, SPF, FTX, that's so stupid. Scams, frauds, NFTs are such a joke. Well, granted, some of those things are actually true. Sure, sure. But if you're still in crypto and you know why you're here. And you're no longer buying the scams because you can identify them. And then you'll swing back to like, I am a genius. I am amazing. I am lucky. Or third parties will say you're lucky when that happens and you'll feel like a genius. You've been chewing glass for three years, but you know, you got lucky, though. You got lucky. How about the Bitcoin ETF, David? Here's a tweet from James Seyfert. What's this about? He just says that the SEC has come out super early and delayed the ARK Invest and 21 shares Bitcoin ETF filing. There wasn't a decision due until November 11th. And typically up until recently, the SEC has always gone up right up until the buzzer. But they decided to delay their decision on this earlier than usual. You know why? Partially? It's some speculation. It's because the government's about to shut down. The U .S. government's about to shut down. That's on Monday, right? On Monday? Yeah. So apparently if by Sunday night, this Sunday night, Congress doesn't reach some sort of compromise resolution, whatever agreement to keep the government running, then it shuts down yet again. I mean, how many times have we been through this? And so this is the SEC just getting ahead of that so that the stuff doesn't expire while the government shut down. And I guess, I don't know what would happen if the government shut down and these deadlines were missed. But maybe they would de facto be approved. I think that could be how it works. Is this some sort of pseudo oracle about how the SEC thinks that if we do go for a shutdown, we'll get shut down all the way until at least November 11th? I have no idea. I have no idea what this could mean. I do know this is good news. So Congress, both Democrats and Republican lawmakers, sent a letter to Gary Gensler pleading that he approve a spot Bitcoin ETF.
The Crypto Overnighter
A highlight from 668:SECs AI Dragnet and Ripples Courtroom Win
"Why do tacos get their own day of the week? Is it because Mondays are so rough, we need a Tuesday filled with beefy tortillas shared with good friends? If so, why don't we have Wellington Wednesdays stroganoff Saturdays, and heck, beefball Mondays? Then Mondays would just be another reason to enjoy our favorite beef with our favorite people. Together, we bring more. Beef, it's what's for dinner, funded by beef farmers and ranchers. Good evening, and welcome to the Crypto Overnighter. I'm Nick Ademus, and I will be your host as we take a look at the latest cryptocurrency news and analysis. So sit back, relax, and let's get started. And remember, none of this is financial advice. And it's 10 p .m. Pacific on Wednesday, September 13th, 2023. Welcome back to the Crypto Overnighter, where we have no sponsors, no hidden agendas, and no BS. But we do have the news, so let's talk about that. Tonight, we dig into the SEC's AI surveillance plans led by Gary Gensler. What does that mean for privacy and regulation? Ripple scores a point in court, but what's the real cost? OneCoin's co -founder faces 20 years behind bars, a reminder to always do your due diligence. Craig Wright dodges criminal sanctions, but raises questions about legal loopholes in crypto. North Korea's Lazarus Group makes another appearance, this time targeting Coinex for a cool $55 million. And finally, Coinbase is lighting up Bitcoin transactions by integrating the Lightning Network. Gary Gensler confirmed the U .S. Securities Exchange Commission uses artificial intelligence for financial surveillance. This revelation came during a Senate oversight hearing on September 12th. Gensler stated that the SEC uses AI technologies to monitor the financial sector for signs of fraud and manipulation. The SEC has not issued a formal public declaration detailing the use of AI. Gensler also faced criticism for the SEC's rulemaking pace and duration of comment periods. He remains adamant that crypto trading platforms should adhere to rigorous U .S. securities regulations. The SEC chair argues that most crypto tokens will likely pass the investment contract test. Gensler cited noncompliance with securities laws in the crypto industry, leading to the agency's enforcement approach. He also mentioned that the SEC has filed approximately 750 enforcement actions in the last year. Gensler warned that AI's ability to generate deepfake content poses a genuine threat to financial markets. He defended the SEC's key rulemaking initiatives amid heavy pushback from lawmakers. The SEC aims to bring DeFi under its jurisdiction, stating that existing rules also apply to the crypto sector. The SEC's adoption of AI for financial surveillance is a significant development. It's a clear signal that the regulatory body is doubling down on its efforts to monitor and control the crypto space. This move aligns with Gensler's consistent stance that the crypto industry should fall under the same regulatory frameworks as traditional financial markets. The use of AI could potentially tighten the noose around crypto activities, making it more challenging for traders and investors to operate freely. While the technology can be a powerful tool for detecting fraud and manipulation, it also raises concerns about privacy and the extent of government surveillance. Gensler's warning about the potential for AI -generated deepfake content adds another layer of complexity. It suggests that the SEC is not only looking to regulate, but also to protect the market from new types of threats. However, Gensler's approach has not been without its critics. The pace of rulemaking and the lack of clarity have drawn ire from both the crypto community and lawmakers. The SEC's aggressive enforcement actions, totaling around 750 in the last year, indicate a strategy of regulation by enforcement, which many find to be problematic. Now, if you're worried about Big Brother and C3PO teaming up to watch your every move, don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe. So now, let's pivot from surveillance to legal battles. Ripple is scoring in court. What does that mean for crypto and regulation? Ripple is in the midst of a legal battle with the SEC. The SEC initially accused Ripple of violating federal securities laws by selling its native cryptocurrency, XRP, without registering it as a security. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and President Monica Long have been vocal about their intent to fight the SEC all the way through. The company has already spent over $100 million defending the case. A significant ruling came in July when US District Court Judge Analisa Torres stated that XRP was not necessarily a security. This opened the doors for Ripple to expand its business not just in the US, but globally. The SEC requested permission to file an interlocutory appeal against this ruling, but as for now, the request has yet to be decided upon. Ripple is also focusing 80 % of its hiring efforts outside the US, targeting markets like Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, and Dubai. The ongoing Ripple vs SEC case is a test for the crypto industry's relationship with regulators. Ripple's refusal to back down sends a strong message to the SEC and other regulatory bodies that the crypto industry will not be bullied. The SEC's actions here are part of a broader crackdown on the crypto industry. Frankly, I see it as an overreach of authority. The recent court ruling in favor of Ripple has not only given the company a legal upper hand, it also provided a glimmer of hope for the broader crypto ecosystem. It challenges the SEC's narrative and could set a precedent for other cases. The fact that Ripple is planning to focus its hiring outside the US is a clear sign of how regulatory uncertainty is driving crypto innovation away from the US, a point that should concern US policymakers. The case is shaping up to be a defining moment for crypto regulation in the US. It could have far reaching implications for the industry at large. And really, this whole thing is about the future of crypto regulation and the limits of governmental oversight. A point for Ripple, but at what cost? Make sure you're following us to stay updated on this legal thriller. But speaking of costs, some people are paying dearly. From courtrooms to prison cells, let's delve into the dark underbelly of crypto scams with OneCoin's co -founder, Carl Greenwood.
a16z
A highlight from AI x Crypto
"AI is very much a technology that thrives and enables top -down centralized control, whereas crypto is a technology that's all about bottom -up, decentralized cooperation. One of the points of NFTs was to support the artists, but if the artists themselves are now machine learning models, then who exactly are we supporting? One of the things that will become important in a world where anyone can participate online is to be able to prove that you are human for various different purposes. If we're going to incentivize people to contribute data, basically we're going to incentivize people to create fake data so they can get paid. So we have to have some sort of a mechanism to make sure that the data you're contributing is authentic. Hello everyone and welcome back to the A16Z podcast. This is your host Steph Smith, but today I'm passing the baton back to longtime host Sonal Choksi. This, of course, is also a crossover episode from our sister podcast Web3 with A16Z, which Sonal now hosts. There are few technologies over the last few years that have quite captured the zeitgeist like crypto and AI. So in today's episode, Sonal sits down with guests Ali Yahya and Dan Bonet to explore the ways in which these two emerging technologies oppose yet also beautifully augment one another. And they attack this from both directions. How crypto can help AI, like how crypto acts as a decentralizing counterweight to the somewhat centralizing force where AI models with more data, more compute, and more complex models do tend to win. But also how AI can help crypto. For example, are we at the point where LLMs should be writing smart contract code? And what about all these deepfakes we keep hearing about? Let's find out. Welcome to Web3 with A16Z, a show about building the next generation of the Internet from the team at A16Z Crypto that includes me, your host, Sonal Choksi. Today's all new episode covers the convergence of two important top of mind trends, AI, artificial intelligence and crypto. This has major implications for how we all live our lives every day. So this episode is for anyone just curious about or already building in the space. Our special guests today are Dan Bonet, Stanford professor and senior research advisor at A16Z Crypto. He's a cryptographer who's been working on blockchains for over a decade. And the topics have a strong intersection between cryptography, computer security and machine learning, all of which are his areas of expertise. And then we also have Ali Yahya, general partner at A16Z Crypto, who also worked at Google previously, where he not only worked on a distributed system for robotics, more specifically as sort of collective reinforcement learning, which involved training a single neural network that contributed to the actions of an entire fleet of robots, but also worked on Google Brain, where he was one of the core contributors to the machine learning library, TensorFlow. And actually, Dan and Ali go back since Ali was an undergrad and master's student at Stanford. So this conversation is really more of a hallway jam between them that I asked to join. And we cover everything from deepfakes and bots to proof of humanity in a world of AI and much, much more. The first half is all about how AI could benefit from crypto and the second half on how crypto could benefit from AI. And the thread throughout is the tension between centralization versus decentralization. As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as investment, legal, business or tax advice. Please see A16Z .com slash disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments, especially since we are investors and companies mentioned in this episode. But first, we begin with how the two worlds intersect with the quick sharing of areas or visions that they're excited about. The first voice you'll hear is Ali's. There is a really good sci -fi novel called The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson in which there is this device known as the illustrated primer. That is a kind of artificially intelligent device that acts as your mentor and your teacher throughout life. And so when you're born, you're paired to an AI, essentially, that knows you really well, learns your preferences, follows you throughout life and helps you make decisions and steers you in the right direction. So there's like a sci -fi future in which you could build such an AI, but you very much wouldn't want that AI to be controlled by a monopolistic tech giant in the middle because that position would provide that company with a great deal of control and solve these kinds of questions of privacy and sovereignty, and you'd want to have kind of control over it. And then also, what if the company goes away or they change the rules or they change the pricing? It would be great if you could build an AI that could run for a very, very long time and could get to know you over the course of a lifetime, but have that really be yours. And so there is this vision in which you could do that with a blockchain. You could embed an AI within a smart contract and with the power of zero knowledge proofs, you could also keep your data private. And then over the course of decades, this AI can become smarter and can help you. And then you have the option to do whatever you want with it or change it in whichever way you want to shut it down. And so that's kind of an interesting vision for long running AIs that are continually evolving and continually becoming better. It'd be better if it were the case that they weren't just controlled by a single centralized company. Of course, it's a very science fiction idea because there are lots of problems, including the problems of verification and the problems of keeping data private, using cryptography and still being able to compute on top of that data, maybe with fully homomorphic encryption. All of these problems continue to be outstanding, but it's not something that's inconceivable. Wow. I love Ali's vision there. I love it too, especially given that quote, I think it was Asimov that today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact. Ali, I know you have a meta framework for thinking about all this stuff that I've heard you share before. Can you share that now too? Yeah, there is this broader narrative that has existed for quite some time now that's only becoming much more accentuated now with the development of things like LLMs. Actually define that really quickly, just for listeners who aren't already familiar, just as context. So an LLM stands for large language model, and it uses some of the technology that was developed at Google back in 2017. There's this famous paper known as Attention is All You Need. That was the title of the paper and it outlined what are now known as transformers. That's the basis basically of some of the new models that people have been training these days, including chat GPT and so on. All of these are large language models or LLMs. There was that famous, I think 2018 line from Peter Thiel that AI is communist and crypto is libertarian. That line is like very on point actually because AI and crypto in many ways are natural counterweights for one another. And maybe we can go deep over the course of the podcast into each one of these as we go through examples, but there are four major ways in which that's true. The first is that AI is very much a technology that thrives and enables top -down centralized control. Whereas crypto is a technology that's all about bottom -up decentralized cooperation. And in many ways, actually you can think of crypto as the study of building systems that are decentralized that enable large -scale cooperation of humans, where there isn't really any central point of control. So that's one natural way in which these two technologies are counterweights for one another. Another one is that AI is a sustaining innovation in that it reinforces the business models of existing technology companies because it helps them make top -down decisions. And the best example of this would be Google being able to decide exactly what ad to display for each of their users across billions of users and billions of page views. Whereas crypto is actually a fundamentally disruptive innovation in that it has a business model fundamentally that's at odds with the business models of big tech companies. And so as a result, it's a movement that is spearheaded by rebels, by the fringes as opposed to being led by the incumbents. So that's the second. A third one is that AI will probably relate and interplay a lot with all of the trends towards privacy because AI as a technology has built in all sorts of incentives that because we will have companies that want access to all of our data and AI models that are trained on more and more data will become more and more effective. And so I think that that leads us down a path of the AI panopticon where there's just collective aggregation of everyone's data into the training of these enormous models in order to make these models as good as possible. Whereas crypto moves us towards the opposite direction, which is a direction of increasing individual privacy. It's a direction of increasing sovereignty where users have control over their own data. And those two trends I think will be very important. And this is just another important way in which crypto is the counterweight for AI. And maybe the final one has to do with this latest trend in AI. The fact that AI is now very clearly a powerful technology for generating new art is now a creative tool that will lead us to infinite abundance of media, infinite creativity in many ways. And crypto is a counterweight to that because it helps us cut through all of the abundance and helping us distinguish what's created by humans versus what's created by AI. And cryptography will be an essential part of maintaining and preserving what actually is human in a world where 1000x more of the content is actually artificially generated. So these are all things that we can talk about, but I think that there is this important meta narrative and these two technologies are very much diametrically opposing in many respects. So to add to that, this is a wonderful summary. And I would say also that there's also a lot of areas where techniques from AI are having an impact in blockchains and vice versa, where techniques from blockchains are having an impact in AI. I'll give a brief answer here because we're going to dive into the details in just a minute, but there are many points of intersection. I guess we'll talk about applications of zero knowledge for machine learning in just a minute, but I also want to touch on all these applications where machine learning itself can be used to write code. So for example, machine learning can be used to write solidity code that goes into contract. It can be used to find maybe errors in codes and so on. There's points of intersection where machine learning can be used to generate deepfakes and blockchains can actually help to protect against deepfakes. And so I guess we're going to touch on all these points, but the interesting thing is that there's really quite a lot of intersection between blockchains and machine learning.
The Voicebot Podcast
A highlight from Generative AI News - GPT-4 LLM Moderation, CEO and Gen AI, Llama 2, Voiceflow, Anthropic, Pindrop & More - Ep 345
"This is episode 345 of the VoiceBot Podcast. It's the 28th edition of the Generative AI News Rundown. Top stories this week include GPT -4 for LLM moderation, what's really driving CEOs to adopt Generative AI, Llama 2, Amazon, VoiceFlow, Anthropic, PinDrop, and more. Welcome back to everyone in VoiceBot Nation and those of you joining us from the world of Synthetia. This is Brett Kinsella, your host of the VoiceBot Podcast. We have another episode of the Generative AI News Rundown for you. And this week, it's where Eric Schwartz and I from VoiceBot .ai break down the top news of the week. And, more importantly, we offer the story behind the story, not just the news, but the perspective. As always, you can listen here or watch on VoiceBot's YouTube channel. I think you know where to find that. I know many of you like the story links that we provide, so you can read more about the stories or curate your own list, back catalog. You can find all the links for today's stories in the podcast notes or in the Synthetia post for this week's GAIN. Hopefully, that's easy for you to find. But we also have something new for you as well. We read and write and cover many stories every week, but we read more than we actually write about or that we have time to talk about in the GAIN show. So we figured out another way for you to stay connected with the news. Several times per week, we call it GAIN daily, but it's not really every day. It's like three or four times a week. We send out the GAIN daily news brief as a LinkedIn newsletter. So each issue has five to seven story links. This is the headline and the link. They also have a data chart in there and one research paper that we think is worth reading. So it's links. We curate so you don't have to. If you'd like to sign up for that, it's on LinkedIn, but the easiest way to do it is just go to bit .ly forward slash GAIN dash newsletter. bit .ly forward slash GAIN dash newsletter. It's all over the case. Okay, let's get back to GAIN. And the top stories include how to use GPT -4 to moderate LLMs and spend even more money with OpenAI, the groups pressuring CEOs to adopt generative AI. We also have more funding news this week. That includes SK Telecom's nine -figure investment in Anthropic and how it points to a new phase of LLM competition. Voiceflow doubles users on the back of generative AI and then raises new funding and grows valuation by 50%. Interesting how that happens. DynamoFL, they announced a series A funding for a privacy -focused generative AI model. That's interesting. And our friends at OpenAI acquire Digital Studio Global Illumination. That's turned a lot of heads, confused a lot of people. We can give you a perspective on that. Also, stories from IBM and the new service with Metaslama 2, Amazon's latest generative AI feature. Google generative AI search has new features as well. The U .S. Department of Defense, Roblox, deepfake detection, and a whole lot more. Eric and I finish up by picking our generative AI winners and losers of the week. Next up, LLMs for content moderation. Why CEOs are pushing generative AI, funding, features, and a whole lot more. Let's get started. All right, folks, I'm Brett Kinsella. This is Gain, the generative AI news rundown. We do this every week, most recently at 11 a .m. Eastern time. We take about 45 minutes to an hour to talk about the latest generative AI news of the week. And we have a lot of great stories for you this week. You know, LLama's back in the headlines, a little deal with IBM. It's amazing how Meta is coming back. We'll talk a little bit about that, and particularly using open source generative AI to do it. We also have GPT -4, a suggestion from OpenAI to use it for moderation, but maybe not the type of moderation you might think initially. We have a number of new funding rounds. Anthropic, Voiceflow. We have an acquisition. We have a new kid on the block out of the West Coast, too, to talk about today. Amazon. We have Google. We have stories about deepfakes. So a lot going on today. And to break it all down, I have my colleague, Eric Schwartz with me. Hey, Eric. Hey, looking forward to hitting all these big stories. All right. Eric is the head writer at Voicebot .ai. And someone who I believe has written more stories in generative AI than anybody else in the industry, certainly in conversational AI as well. And I did notice we have over 5 ,000 stories written in Voicebot .ai. And Eric has more stories than I do these days. I think I only have around 15 to 1600 of those. So there you go. Eric is the font of wisdom, and we'll get right into this. And I think, Eric, the top story this week, or I think one of the most interesting stories of this week, and I wanted to feature it, was that OpenAI came out with this blog post that suggests that you use GPT -4 to moderate your GPT -4 -based applications or your other large language model applications. And one of the things that was very interesting about it is OpenAI generally, they put out announcements about their product. They don't generally put out announcements around some sort of best practice or technique to use their product. And I'll give you, so that's like one thing, and I think some of the other things we'll talk about this in terms of what it is and what it is not, is it has this whole little flow chart of sort of what you're doing in terms of how to think about the architecture for applying GPT -4 to moderation. And Synthetia did this helpful overlay of numbers, because otherwise, how would you figure out what's the order of operations here? I looked at it, I was like, oh, well, that's really interesting. So we broke that all down. But there was a couple of things that I was thinking about here is like what it's not. And what it is not is it is not moderating, although you could potentially moderate, it's not moderating the output of the LLM. That's not what their focus of this is. And it's not about moderating, so hallucinations or the bad things that the LLM might say. And it's also not using it to moderate social media spaces or things like that, although potentially it could be used for that. It's about moderating the inputs. And it's actually a little interesting because the video that they had describing it actually makes you think that it's about, they show this chart, which was really about moderators who were looking at things basically that have already been put up. But no, that's not what it's about. It's about this idea of training a model based on your policies, your content policies, and then scoring the prompts to see if they are acceptable use or not. And if they're not, then you would obviously come back with a message to them, we don't do that or something like it. But the first thing it needs to do is do this filtering. Is this prompt OK? Yeah, it's funny. These terms are, there are all these technical terms that are then used by the general public and sometimes they're not always the same. And I feel like, honestly, in terms of content moderation, there should be one specifically for these definitions so they can make sure that people are using the term correctly. But I think OpenAI is not wrong in terms of what the AI could do as a content moderator for these kinds of inputs. But I don't know, I question how much fine tuning would be necessary in order for it to parse the acceptable from the unacceptable when the distinction is not very obvious, when it's not very obviously something that shouldn't be going in if it's something that's on the margins. Yeah, absolutely. Shout out to Dave Gerbino, who just rolled into the YouTube livestream. I know there's a bunch of people on LinkedIn as well. Let us know if you're out there. Make comments on this as well. We'll incorporate them in the show, ask questions. All those things are welcome here at GAIN. That's why we do this live. So, yeah, I think this is really interesting. And one of the points that I brought out in the Cintidia article was that we're talking a lot about the LLM outputs. And that is actually important. And you're going to have content and policy guidelines associated with what's appropriate for the LLM to talk about. On the back end, you might want to do some analysis of that. Is this appropriate? That's in addition to the hallucination checking, which is truthfulness. We've got to think about appropriateness as well as truthfulness on the back end. And these same techniques that they're using to identify appropriateness, moderation, for the inputs, the prompts, they could use for the outputs from the LLM to make sure that it stays within the guardrails. In fact, that's essentially – or that's one of the ways the guardrails actually work. But there's less conversation about the idea of putting guardrails or moderation around the inputs. And you would think about this more in terms of like social media because user -generated content is something that needs to be moderated. Now, is that algorithmically or the human reviewers? Are there other types of automatic stops? All these techniques actually exist in the social media space. In the large language model space, generative AI space, there is this co -creation element. So the prompt is kind of like UGC. And most of the examples are like, you know, making bombs or other types of violence or things that the model doesn't want you to ask about because it doesn't want to answer about it. It's like out of scope for what they will do. So that's the idea there. But there's also this idea of security, which is going to start coming up really significantly, because there might be some things, not just like it would be uncomfortable or outside of your policy, but there might be some things that people attempt to do with prompt in order to violate security along these lines, too. So I think this is going to become a bigger issue going forward. And I'm kind of happy they did this. Oh, there's one other thing, too, I'll just throw in and I'll throw it back to you to close it out. They talk about this idea you can use GPT -4, which is like very good to train, essentially, and it creates this prediction model about whether something is in or outside of the policy guidance. But then you use that to train a smaller model, which then can be your moderator, your automated inline moderator for this identification. And why would you do that? Because, well, GPT -4 is kind of slow, but more importantly, what they're talking about is lower cost. And you want to save on all those inference costs. And these smaller models are just far cheaper to run. Yeah, that concept makes sense of having these sort of micro monitoring and then obviously with the ability to toss things up the chain as though we're a human moderation system. I think this is going to be important, but it does have that weird sort of like, speaking of security, it's like you want to make sure people aren't putting in proprietary information, but that means somehow you have to train it to spot proprietary information, which feels like a bit of a paradox. Yeah, absolutely. And somewhere I did put in, I think, one of these posts, GPT - $ instead of the number, because it is interesting, Alan Furstenberg just said, so an LLM to watch the output of the LLM. Do we need an LLM to watch the LLM that watches the output? And the answer is yes, exactly. And so isn't this amazing? We're implementing all these LLM based solutions and they have potential problems. And what's the solution? Another LLM. So always good that we're just one step ahead of these problems that people have that we're creating, but then we're solving. And it's actually all pretty benign, I think, for the most part. But I was happy to see that they did post it because we should see some more of the sharing of best practices about how to do this and recommendations. And they have an incentive to do it because this is going to be something that could be a blocker for systems going live. And if they then propose a solution to the blocker for going live, then they can get more people bringing systems live using GPT large language models and all good for them. OK, but there's another story here about adoption and adoption of large language models. And Eric, you had a story this week from some IBM data around what's going on in the enterprise. In fact, there's so much going on in the enterprise in terms of adoption. But why is that? Yeah, there's a real excitement when we see so many stories about companies being excited to employ generative AI in different ways. You know, investment rounds that seem out of proportion sometimes to the size of a company or where it's at in its product development. But yeah, there's evidence that there's just so much pressure in both the positive and potentially negative sense from all stakeholders in a company. You know, it's not just the development teams that are pushing for it. It's the boards, it's the employees, it's the investors. They all are urging company executives to look for ways to bring generative AI into business models. And, you know, the data from IBM shows that the CEOs are just as happy to start bringing in. There's 69 percent of CEOs in this study said that they see broad benefits from generative AI across their organization. every And it's source that might want to emphasize caution or slow things down, which is sometimes the case in certain industries or for certain kinds of technology. And generally speaking, all the inputs that executives get says, go ahead, keep going. Right. Exactly. And Yeah. the signals are strong. I mean, two -thirds of board members and just about two -thirds of investors, CEOs, 3 ,000 CEOs across the globe said, hey, yeah, I'm getting pressure from those two areas to implement generative AI in some way. And also interestingly, like 49 percent said that customers were pressuring them as well. And you might wonder why customers are. Well, one of the things might be features, but the other thing is cost. And I've seen that. I've actually talked to some companies who are working with generative AI today and they've already had customers ask them how much of a discount do I get now that using generative AI because they know that there's going to be some productivity gains. And that's really where this comes from. I think you have some articles coming up fairly soon about this. And this is going to be something we're going to talk a lot more about. We've been overwhelmed by the news and the news has been very important. But over the next coming weeks, we're going to be talking a lot more about market data because we're starting to see some data that actually is pretty useful because it's based on behavior, not just based on forecasts. And so forecasts are OK because they're based on assumptions and some of those can be tested. But when we start seeing behavior and we start seeing data that sort of indicates why behavior is taking place, that's going to be really interesting. So we have a lot of stuff I know that you're working on, Eric, to bring out over the next month on this front. Yeah, it's definitely some indications that this is much more than the excitement over a new fad and that this feels much more fundamentally. I mean, how good is this? CEOs are always like they always want to do these initiatives and they have to convince their board, they have to convince their investors that they're spending their money wisely. 70 percent of CEOs want to do something with generative AI because they think they're going to get some sort of great benefit out of it. And oh, by the way, all their constituencies want them to do it, too. So this is one of the things where if you think of organizational friction that can stop the adoption of new technologies, new techniques, processes, it's not there. In fact, it's like an organizational lubricant for driving adoption in this space. Yeah, and it helps that a lot of, not everything about this technology, but there are many facets of it that have an immediate impact or have very easy to grasp effects on a business. So it's not trying to convince people of some obtuse new technical thing that won't be obviously changing the business. Immediate cost savings. Yeah, and we'll have a conversation next week, I think, about some people thinking that like, oh, that this market's in trouble and all that. Like the data I'm seeing suggests it's not because people are spending money on this already. OK, so and oh, another place that people are spending money is in the generative AI funding fountain.
The Voicebot Podcast
"deepfakes" Discussed on The Voicebot Podcast
"You know, don't worry about it, right? And so, and then immediately something comes out and it's like factually incorrect. It didn't have the Clone Wars in it. It's like, it forgot like the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV show, which was like just, which was a disaster, was terrible, but which was just broadcast live. And this editor went onto Twitter and said, hey, by the way, I did not have anything to do with this. They just told me about this. This is just like terrible. It's not just bad ethics. It's just bad professionalism. Yeah, I mean, it's one thing to say, oh, we're gonna try writing stories using an AI bot. It's another thing to say, and also you won't be editing it and it will just publish by itself and you'll have no control over any of it, which, you know, it tells that editor what some of the higher-ups may think of his job, but it also, the results shows that actually they're wrong and what he does is kind of important. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, this is like, you know, we've talked about Gannett more recently. We talked about Axel Springer. This is happening, Buzzfeed. And like, there's a lot of fails out there, but media companies are gonna do this because they're always trying to squeeze some margin out. You know, it's also a tough advertising environment for anyone who lives off of that. So they're gonna try to get more page views and more page views means more ad revenue. So just like, it's, we're gonna, everyone's gonna have to like, just become better consumers of information. I mean, it's the internet and now bots are writing things. It's not just trolls, it's bots and sometimes the stuff is wrong. So just look at that byline. If a person wrote it, I would feel more comfortable than if a bot wrote it because what we're seeing right now is when the bots write it, a lot of times there's no human review. Yeah, I still can't get over the idea that it was just published without any human even- I know, like this doesn't happen. It's like big things, like someone's got to look at it. Okay, in any event, Human in the Loop. This is like a big story that people should be focused on. Okay, so another story here we have is Virgin Cruises adopts deepfake Jennifer Lopez as spokesmodel. You know, we've seen some things with commercials in the past, like the young Charles Barkley and things like that with deepfakes. This one is actually a little bit interesting. Someone told me this isn't generative. Well, maybe. It depends on whether you think deepfakes are generative. But in any event, it is a deepfake. And what it allows you to do is it's like a template. It's actually, there's not really good generative stuff in there. You can basically say where you're going and all these things. You can create this custom invitation to your friends that Jennifer Lopez will deliver via video. It's like Gen AI. Yeah, there's two things there. One is that yes, you will get an invitation where you hear Jennifer Lopez say your name and the name of the person who sent it. And it is generative in the sense that it's a voice model saying words that Jennifer Lopez did not say. It's not replacing, it's not using her voice to say every person's name. And then the other element is saying sailor because it doesn't understand a lot. Yes, it does understand reverse to sailor, which is the bizarre term that Virgin Cruises uses for passengers. But the other thing is that it points to, hey, guess what? Generative AI and deepfakes are now so mainstream that it can be a lighthearted advertising campaign. And people will understand what we're talking about when we tell them. Yeah, and by the way, the deepfake's really good. For those of you who are just listening later, really high quality. I don't know how much of this is real shots and deepfakes. I'll just take them at their word that it was mostly deepfakes. But it just showed a few seconds of that on the screen. I think it's really interesting. And it is also really interesting that we are, you know, that we're starting to see deepfakes for these other types of entertainment applications, which are just sort of novelty oriented. And so, you know, deepfakes, we talked about deepfake detection and fraud and scams earlier on in the Google story. But now, you know, we're once again seeing, hey, there's like people like this on the good side. And we'll see. I don't know if it'll be real popular or not. I mean, we've seen the gender of AI girlfriend explode. So who knows? This is true. Okay, folks, we're time. We're set up for winners and losers of the week. And I'm going to start with losers. I get to claim the Gizmodo one because I was the one who found that story first. So yeah, I mean, come on, just like, don't do that. I know everyone's sort of rushing to it. And there might be some other things too where there's like labor disputes and all these other things that are going on at some of these big publishing companies. But just basically have your editors review things. It's not to say that everything has to be written by a human. Automated Insights has been writing NCAA men's basketball stories for years. It's been writing earnings release summaries, all these things like AI is like writing stuff in the newsroom is not new. But in those cases, everything was checked. There's like a fact check. There's an editor looking at it. Why can't we just do that? Yeah, again, it's stress testing the models and everything is great. But at the end of the process, you need someone to look at the result. Otherwise you will have those issues. I mean, that's why every marketing company that says it's using AI hastens to add and also will be looking at what produces before we publish a tweet created by AI. Okay, so who is your loser for the week? I'm actually combining. I'm putting Chinese AI developers as both the winners and losers for this week for a couple reasons because China's finalized their regulations for generative AI. And while on the loser side, they are pretty strict. There's a lot of red tape and a lot of hoops that will definitely make it more difficult for companies there to engage, to employ generative AI for projects like marketing. I mean, the number of disclaimers they would have needed to add to their own version of the Gen AI Jennifer Lopez thing is significant. But on the other hand, they're a lot less strict than the draft version was. The draft version was basically just stop the dead in its tracks. So there's a lot of Chinese companies and AI developers who are simultaneously relieved and trying to push the government to relax the world even more. Your winner for the week. I have to say the healthcare industry seems to be doing really well. There's a lot of really exciting stuff. We talked about the Mayo Clinic. The first drug trial using a drug discovered and developed using generative AI is now undergoing human trials, which could be huge for a lot of people, especially for investigating cures for some of the rare diseases. And I think healthcare is an industry that works slowly. But I mean, this could be very huge for the pharmaceutical industry. Fair enough. And I will choose Anthropic and Claude because I think it'll generate more interest in their API. It has that big 100K context window that we can all use now, which is great. It's free for now. Like everyone go use it now because at some point they'll put a paywall in front of it. It has a great summarization feature. We can upload documents, which I just love. And they're going to generate a lot of data that they wouldn't have had otherwise. It's going to be able to improve their models over time. So I think that's my winner for the week. Eric, thanks so much. Thank you. Adam, Nigel, Martin, and everybody who joined today. Thanks a lot for giving us a shout out, contributing to the show. I will be back next week at 11 a.m. Eastern time. So join us live on LinkedIn or YouTube. We'd really like that. Oh, and sign up for the unparsed conference. Um, bit.ly forward slash unparsed 2023. If you use the voice bot code, you get two for one. I'd love to see you there either online or in person. If you're going to London, let me know. Uh, that's it for today, folks. Bye bye.
The Voicebot Podcast
A highlight from Generative AI News - ChatGPT's Usage Stats, Anthropic's Claude, Lots of Funding Rounds, Deepfakes and New Products - Voicebot Podcast 339
"This is episode 339 of the Voicebot Podcast. It is also the 23rd edition of the Generative AI News Rundown. Top stories this week include reports of Chet GPT's waning website traffic, Anthropic's Claude 2 launch, breaking news about OpenAI, new funding rounds, new AI products, and more. Welcome back to my friends in Voicebot Nation and Synthetialand. Another big week has created us in the world of generative AI. I'm Brett Kinsella, your host of the Voicebot Podcast. I've been here every week for six years with guests talking about conversational AI, generative AI, and synthetic media. We have an amazing back catalog of super guests. You should definitely check out some of those. Some of them are still amazing. Even things that we recorded several years ago are pretty amazing, but certainly we have a really thick catalog from the last year that I think you'll like. But we also cover the news, and we've supplemented those one -on -one interviews with the weekly generative AI news show since February. I would like to know what you think of this show in the format. Do you find it valuable? Do you like it that I post it here in the podcast as well as on YouTube? Have you ever watched it on YouTube? Have you ever joined us live? What would you like to see change, if anything? I definitely appreciate the feedback. The easiest way to give it to me is probably to message me on LinkedIn. Also, if we are not connected on LinkedIn already, when you make the connection requests, let me know you listen to the podcast. That makes it easier to separate the spam requests I get on LinkedIn from important messages from people like you. Also, subscribe to the YouTube channel, youtube .com forward slash at symbol voice by the AI. Then you'll always know when the game show is coming up. Plus, we have other videos we're posting all the time from people who are really movers and shakers in the industry. We just had Synthidia 3. We have some amazing guests who are presenting demos of generative AI solutions just a couple weeks ago, and those videos are rolling out right now. We had Model Mania, where we were talking about LLM and conversational AI applications for the enterprise. Those videos are up. I think you're going to like it. So definitely go to VoiceBot's YouTube channel and subscribe and like a video while you're there. Let me know what you think of those as well. But definitely tell me what you think of the game show and join us live. It's usually Thursdays 11 a .m. on LinkedIn and YouTube. We'd love to have you join. Make comments. We incorporate it into the show. It's really fun. You'll hear me do that today if you haven't not already familiar with it. OK. Back to our game show. My guest host today is Eric Schwartz, who you know is the head writer at VoiceBot .ai. Today's story lineup includes Anthropix, Claude 2 chat assistant that is taking on chat GPT. We break down the real story. We also actually demo it live during the show if you want to watch the video. Really interesting what's going on there. There's a story there behind the story, not just like a chat GPT clone going on here. Open AI also. There's a lot of news. Website traffic drops. Is that a real thing? Public availability of several of its foundation models. That's long overdue. And news that was breaking news while we were recording. We actually did a quick hit on it. That breaking news was the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission in the U .S. taking action against open AI. A generative AI funding fountain also continues to flow. We had news from Voice .ai, Resemble .ai, Vellum, Prolific, KPMG and Microsoft's new monstrous valuation prediction. Apparently generative AI is just blowing the doors off of the valuation predictions people have for Microsoft. Really interesting. We also have stories from Shutterstock, game development platform Unity, X .ai, Elon Musk's new open AI, latest new company on the generative AI front, Mail Clinic, Gizmodo's AI fail, and Virgin Cruises' Jennifer Lopez AI deep fake. It's all here. And of course, we conclude with the generative AI winners and losers of the week. Next up, is chat GPT in trouble? What is the story behind Claude? Who is getting money and who is adding features in generative AI land? Let's get started.
The Hugh Hewitt Show: Highly Concentrated
The A.I. Dilemma: Uncover the Deepfake Era
"Piece coming out in the Washington Post on Sunday about, look, I don't even want to talk to you if you don't know history, because human beings are human beings are human beings. Now, AI is a new machine. And like the dawn of the nuclear age, it's a very deadly new machine. And people have to think about it, know about it, and consider it, but not in an alarmist sort of way, and not in order to draw attention and attraction to themselves. And by the way, I don't want any summits at the White House. I want long conversations between very smart people about AI that are done in public. And that the technologists will explain to the lawyers, and the lawyers will explain to the judges, and the judges and the lawyers will explain to the regulators, and everyone will explain to the legislators and the executive branch what it means and why it matters, and that we have a branch of the Department of Defense working around the clock on artificial intelligence deterring and the use of it against Americans and their freedom. That's the important part. But you'll learn so much from this documentary, this presentation, The AI Dilemma, that you have never known before. For example, do you realize that in three seconds of my voice, advanced AI that exists now, can actually create you, Hewitt, saying anything? So the deepfake era is definitely upon us. That's just the thing that stuck with me. There are millions of hours. I've been on the air since 1990. So you take 33 years of me saying anything, and you're going to be able to piece that together. But not just me, you. Adam and Harley and Ben are all been on the air at least three seconds, so they can be generated into entire personalities by the creative process of artificial intelligence, and AI can teach itself.
TED Talks Daily
"deepfakes" Discussed on TED Talks Daily
"I mean, how did you do that? So really at metaphysics we specialize in creating artificially generated content that looks and feels exactly like reality. So we take kind of real world data. We train these neural nets and it can more accurately than VFX, so CGI really create this content that looks and feels so natural. And so that is a great example of the AI being kind of prompted by the natural performance of a person and kind of a face goes on top. And it helps the fact that your cofounder is he's a pretty good Tom Cruise impersonator. Indeed. Miles Fisher is a foremost Tom Cruise, but not Tom Cruise, yeah. I think you have another example as well. Can we see that one? Yes, absolutely. Going kind of beyond faces now talking about voice. Solo can go through smile be a honey but to do it wonder say one flag me boy. This kid got cold I gave me that I'll just make my way please I feel although it's nothing gonna drive may stop it tell us what's happening there. So what you see there is really it is the singing voice of the lady singing Spanish and aloe black, who sings wake me up via Vichy song that he wrote with Avicii. We are transporting her voice across to his face so he doesn't sing in Spanish and then suddenly we transport it again, her voice into his voice. So anybody in the future will be able to speak any language. It'll look perfectly natural and this content is becoming more and more easy to create and eventually it will end up with a scale where we will all be kind of main characters in our own content on the Internet. Okay. Before we dig into that just a bit. Rumor has it, you can also do this with live video. Can that be right? Yes, we can do it live real time. And this is like really at the cutting edge of what we can do today moving from offline processing to where processing it so fast that you can do it in real time. It obviously occurs to everyone in this room that there are some things that can go horribly wrong with this. And we've already seen examples online of we've had photographs of Trump being arrested that were unreal. There could be video of it. There's pornography that can use the faces of celebrities or these things that we've seen Deepak. How do you feel about the downside of this technology? So personally, we build this stuff and I'm worried. Where does the right instinct for everybody to have? And then beyond that, think about, what can we do to prepare ourselves? How can we try to impact the future as it spirals in this direction where, as individuals, it's going to be kind of difficult to understand what's computer generated and what's real. And so there are things that we can do there, raising public awareness of manipulated media. That's one that's this is a great form for that. Will you claim to me that if you were to shut down your company right now, it wouldn't stop the problem of deepfake videos because the technology is out there that that's going to happen anyway. That's not within your control. Yes, there are, we're talking about content that is so compelling if we put any of ourselves inside content and maybe it is talking to our loved ones or just talking to our friends on the beach and it's so realistic if it looks real. It's so compelling. Everybody is trying to create this content today. All of the GPUs in the universe are driving at trying to create this. So it doesn't matter what anyone person does. This will happen and it's happening very, very quickly. So we'll talk about the upside in a second, but it seems like we are going to have to get used to a world where we and our children will no longer be able to trust the evidence of our eyes. I think so. We are going to have to understand a new set of institutions to verify what is authentic media. But then we can begin to lead into some of the creative things that happen from it. And there are benefits that come with that too. So it'll be an accommodation. So talk a bit about the benefits. I mean, obviously, on the entertainment side, there's an amazing number of possibilities. You have Tom Cruise. We can have impossible mission 273 in the year 21 50. You will be with us forever. We're working on number 75,000 right now. I guess that. I guess that is kind of amazing. We love we love lots of people in the world. And we want the possibility that with their permission, we can do more with them. We talk about some other possible upsides. What we've seen in building this content and watching people interact with it, especially if they're kind of interacting with themselves, maybe it's their younger 20 year old self or maybe they're interacting with their partner that the young version of their partner visits tremendous emotional connection that comes from the very, very photorealistic beyond the uncanny kind of content. And so if we can start deploying that among regular people, if we can scale it up so that it works for any kind of person, then we can begin to kind of have more interesting meaningful human kind of interactions and relationships online. And since the pandemic, we all spend more time online, but it's chat and it's email. If we could get more human emotion more feeling, there's a lot that we can do with that. And so education is a good example. We could have an inspiring teacher in thousands of classrooms around the world. Speaking every language in the world at the same time and students could interact with each other in a way that was goes beyond zoom, there can be real cultural exchange, real socialization, there's a lot that we can do. Beyond you. So that teacher example is powerful to me. The fact that a single teacher could turn a written lesson into video in any number of languages and extend indefinitely. That seems like a real amplification of potentially of good human intend. I'm excited about that. I still don't get the family side of it. If you want to have a human connection with someone in your family, isn't it? Weren't people just be creeped out by, oh my God, I was just looking at your avatar. I thought, I thought it was you, you know? Isn't that just creepy? I think this is definitely a creepy element to this, right? And then you go beyond that and the creepiness drops away and the medium drops away and it's the content and the connection that's there. So you know, I imagine that if I collect data from my grandparents who are very old today, then in the future, I'll be able to relive experiences with them and communicate with them and that it's not going to be any good for them, right? They're probably going to have passed on. But for me, it'll help me process who I am, my relationship with them. That idea of kind of decoupling human experience, both from where it happens, and the moment in time that it happens, I think that we can create these experiences through hyperreal photorealistic media that allow us to share the best of our experience as the best of who we are. I'm going to be very curious to see who's can feel that right now. My guess is that there's going to have to be lots of experiments and a lot of things are going to creep us out. And maybe we'll find some things that are just absolutely incredible. But I have an important question for you, which is how the hell do I control me now? You've got me on video. What's to stop me being misused across the Internet now? That's right. I think that as we kind of allow companies to create these realistic experiences as individuals, we need to be empowered to own our real world data, but data used to train the algorithms and we need to control how our photorealistic avatars are created and where they're used. So to this extent, I was looking at kind of conventional current legal institutions to see what we could do to create new rights. So I created a photo realistic avatar of myself, submitted it to the U.S. copyright office to see if they would register my copyright in it. So I think you have shown us what is going to be repeated theme in this conference, which is that future is going to be weird and wonderful at the same time. Quite what the balance is between those two TBD. But this is a world where each of us is going to have to think differently about who we are and claim these rights. What you're saying is that if people have this right, you can picture a world where, for example, if a video goes viral on YouTube without your consent, you'll be able to take it down because of some link back to this. That's right. I think the most important thing that we can do when we're talking about data from a real world being able to power these things is that we need to own property rights over the data. We shouldn't sign it over to companies through terms of service we shouldn't give it away. If you fundamentally own it, then you can be in control. And you're at the ground level of all of the economies and all of the use cases, but you're going to spin up through history. It's a lot, but we're on the way now. Tom Graham, thank you so much for sharing this technology. Thank you very much. PRX.
Marketplace Tech with Molly Wood
"deepfakes" Discussed on Marketplace Tech with Molly Wood
"Creates <Speech_Male> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> <Speech_Music_Female> <Music> a <Speech_Male> thing you're worried <SpeakerChange> about. <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> Joshua had <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> good coot at the <Speech_Female> university of Leeds. <Speech_Music_Female> <Advertisement> <Music> <Advertisement> <Music> <Music> <Music> <Music> <Music> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Music_Female> We'll have a link <Speech_Female> to Joshua's <Speech_Female> pre print paper, <Speech_Music_Female> deepfakes <Speech_Female> and the epistemic <Speech_Music_Female> apocalypse <Speech_Female> that's at our website, <Speech_Female> marketplace tech <Speech_Female> dot org. <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> And if you're wondering <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> about that deep <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> history of <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> deep fakes, Joshua <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> mentioned, <Speech_Female> he's posted some <Speech_Female> examples of <Speech_Female> early manipulated <Speech_Female> photographs over <Speech_Female> on his Twitter feed. <Speech_Female> They include <Speech_Female> a doctored <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> photo from 1910 <Speech_Female> <Advertisement> of <Speech_Female> a livestock <Speech_Female> auction <Speech_Female> where the horses <Speech_Female> and cows <Speech_Female> appear <Speech_Female> quite a bit <Speech_Female> larger than <Speech_Female> they should. <Speech_Female> Another from 1907 <Speech_Female> shows <Speech_Female> a supposed <Speech_Female> ear of corn <Speech_Female> that is so enormous, <Speech_Female> it spans <Speech_Female> an entire <Speech_Music_Female> railroad car. <Speech_Music_Female> I guess <Speech_Music_Female> exaggerated <Speech_Female> agricultural <Speech_Female> products were <Speech_Female> all their age. <Speech_Female> The images are <Speech_Female> pulled from a book <Speech_Female> by Nia Feynman <Speech_Female> called faking <Speech_Female> it, manipulated <Speech_Female> photography <Speech_Music_Female> before Photoshop. <Speech_Music_Female> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Female> And if you missed it <Speech_Female> last week on the show, <Speech_Female> we talked about <Speech_Female> our present day <Speech_Female> version of <Speech_Female> giant fake <Speech_Female> corn. <Speech_Female> All the AI music, <Speech_Female> spreading <Speech_Female> on social media <Speech_Female> these days, <Speech_Music_Female> including the fake <Speech_Female> Drake and The Weeknd <Speech_Female> song that went viral, <Speech_Music_Female> and <Speech_Music_Female> much more. <Speech_Music_Female> It's at our website, <Speech_Music_Female> marketplace tech <Speech_Music_Female> dot org. <Speech_Female> ASUS alvarado <Speech_Music_Female> produced this episode, <Speech_Music_Female> I'm Megan mccarty <Speech_Music_Female> carino, and <Speech_Music_Female> that's marketplace tech. <Music> <Music> <Music> <Music> <Advertisement> <Speech_Music_Female> <Advertisement> This <Speech_Music_Female> is APM. <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> The global news podcast <Speech_Male> from the BBC <Speech_Male> World <SpeakerChange> Service is <Speech_Male> what's been happening. <Speech_Female> <Speech_Female> Why it <Speech_Female> matters. What might <Speech_Male> happen next? <SpeakerChange> I <Speech_Male> think what the global news <Speech_Male> podcast does <Speech_Male> really well is <Speech_Male> pick stories <Speech_Male> about places <Speech_Music_Male> that <Speech_Male> surprise people. <Speech_Music_Male> Try to overturn <Speech_Music_Male> expectations. <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Music_Female> News stories that perhaps <Speech_Music_Female> you won't have heard <Speech_Female> anywhere else and <Speech_Female> the things to look <Speech_Female> out for <SpeakerChange> in the future. <Speech_Male> The global news <Speech_Male> podcast helps <Speech_Male> you catch up with <Speech_Male> our restless world <Speech_Male> in your own time. <Speech_Male> Search for it, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Marketplace Tech with Molly Wood
"deepfakes" Discussed on Marketplace Tech with Molly Wood
"Ears on the Internet. Artificial intelligence tools can generate, convincing images, videos, and voices. Chatbots can spit out confident misinformation. And Twitter users for $8 a month can basically impersonate anyone they like. The specter of an Internet full of fakes has a lot of people worried about an epistemic apocalypse. Basically, total breakdown of our ability to perceive truth and reality. It's something Joshua habgood coot has written about. He's a research fellow at the school of philosophy, religion, and history of science at the university of Leeds in England. I feel like there's been a lot of like very catastrophic discourse about the kind of effects of various new kinds of technology or not epistemic practices, which is to say the practices which we use to gain knowledge about the world to find out truth beyond what we can see and hear in our immediate environment and the thought is every new technology is going to like catastrophically disrupt our practices for generating knowledge and we're going to completely lose track of truth wholesale. So partly I want to engage with that discourse and like do some critical thinking about whether those kinds of very catastrophic predictions are really justified. What can we learn from how people have responded to some of the recent examples of AI fakes? Yeah, I think there are a couple of very interesting cases. So the image of the so called drip Pope, right? So this was a set of images that were produced of the Pope wearing some kind of designer coats, which were like extremely fashionable. And I think a bunch of people did think that these were genuine images of the Pope. I bought it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you might think, okay, I got full this one time. Am I going to get forward again and again? And the question is, what are the stakes on you believing that this is an image of the Pope? Like actually very low. Right, which maybe is why I bought it whereas those fake photos of Trump being arrested, I think people were naturally a little bit more suspicious of. Yeah, exactly. So there's also a whole set of social practices around like checking images of politicians and like you can look for other sources of like what's been going on with Trump like today. Are there examples from the past of how society has adapted to new epistemic challenges like this? It's important to look at the history of deepfakes. There's a whole lot of practice in the late 19th century of people touching up portraits to make them look better. Actually at the end of the 19th century in journalism, all photographs that were printed in newspapers in the United States were to some lesser or greater extent, changed and modified to make them look better. And what they did, they came up with a set of social norms against faking. So this isn't to say that the problems are not going to be serious around deepfakes and other kinds of faking, but that long problems with history and that in a way we're throwing away possible solutions if we forget that history. It's interesting talking about the role of technology in all of this because, you know, I think we've talked a lot about it with social media, the idea that it has allowed for this kind of proliferation of misinformation and threatened democracies and all of these things. But I think that there is a discussion to be had about whether the way that people are using social media in this way is sort of a symptom of, as you say, social practices that were happening before social media allowed for this or whether the technology kind of instigated this kind of thing. Yeah, so I kind of got into this topic by thinking about discourse around fake news and post truth around like 2017 and it was pretty clear that a lot of the discourse around fake news and post truth was almost acquiring the kind of character of a moral panic discourse where it was like there's this terrible problem society is going to collapse democracy is going to collapse and none of the people who are writing about real problems about misinformation and propaganda were paying attention to the kind of longer history of decline and trust, not just in media sources, but in like various kinds of like social like quote unquote authority sources and the political causes of those phenomena. So there's a way in which the carts before the horse. Yeah, it's kind of a chicken and egg thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We see people believing for things and we're like, it's connected to technology, we're like, oh, the technology has got to be the cause and like that's the thing that's driving social change rather than like doing some socially informed like politically informed history and thinking about the way in which a political context has led to decline of trust in media sources. And also the economic context, right? So in a way, social media is much more important in so far as it's had economic effects on local and national and state media rather than it having like terrible effects on the way that people like engage with reality and it's like they've taken away the funding model for lots of forms of media which did have like they weren't perfect but they had like some degree of reliability in keeping track of the world. There seemed to be two main fears when we talk about this sort of one that people will be very easily deceived by these new synthetic media. And the second, the conclusion of that, that people will just be so skeptical of everything that they see that no one will believe anything. There will be no shared reality. Is there a risk of that kind of skepticism? The conditions which are more likely to cause that kind of very generalized skepticism produced by people talking about like how desperately terrible the effects of manipulated media are going to be. You don't become skeptical about all videos that you see after you've seen like one deep fake video, you might do if you read a book which says, it's called something like, ah, the epistemic apocalypse is coming. And it tells you about all of these ways in a kind of quite persuasive way in which we're losing contact with shared reality. So in a way, there's a really horrible self of feeling prophecy where people talking about the possibilities of this very general kind of skepticism or loss of contact with reality are actually more likely to be causing the thing they're worried about than the technology that they're kind of worrying about. So I think there's a real reason to be like measured and like kind of cautious when we're thinking about these really apocalyptic scenarios because of these kind of like self fulfilling warriors where raising the warriors
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
"deepfakes" Discussed on Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
"It's merriam Webster's word of the day for may 8th. Today's word is deepfake. Spelled as one word D, F a KE, deepfake is a noun. It refers to an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to represent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said. Here's the word used in a sentence from DW dot com by Julia Bayer and Ruben baumeister. All sorts of deep fakes are possible, face swaps where the face of one person is replaced by another. Lip synchronization where the mouth of a speaking person can be adjusted to an audio track that is different from the original. Voice cloning where a voice is being copied in order to use that voice to say things. The old maxim things aren't always as they seem, seems more true than ever in the age of deepfakes, a deepfake is an image or a video or audio recording that has been edited using an algorithm to replace the person in the original with someone else, especially a public figure in a way that makes it look authentic. The fake and deepfake is transparent. Deepfakes are not real. The deep is less self explanatory. This half of the term is specifically influenced by deep learning that is machine learning using artificial neural networks with multiple layers of algorithms. With your word of the day, I'm Peter sokolovsky. Visit Miriam Webster dot com today for definitions, wordplay, and trending word lookups.
The Voicebot Podcast
"deepfakes" Discussed on The Voicebot Podcast
"So my assessment here is it's going to be very hard for some of these independents unless they get well financed to compete on the open domain. Just because it's not just that they have a lead, they just have so much more data, bigger models, bigger parameters, they can run, they can afford to run, not just the training, but the inference. At least in the near term, it's not to say it can't be done, but it will be the other thing about this is I thought it was really interesting that a single one of these answers included the fact that like chat GTP. Because actually what they should have said is the best way to compete with some of these other solutions is to differentiate all these other things that they said. But they didn't reference the fact that chat GPT is actually the independent virtual assistant that came up. You can use voice with it if you use some of the models within the playground with OpenAI. So there's other people who've added voice to it. But it is basically this voice assistant. I will say this last thing and I've got to interview in the podcast coming up shortly with Adam chire. When we talk about this idea of doing versus knowing and the voice assistance, we all know Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri. They're all doing engines. They're assistants that do things for us. We ask them and they perform a task that test could be information retrieval, but and the knowing the intelligence side is something that they're actually not very good at, usually they can give you a little bit of information, but they can't actually break down concepts very well and re jumble it and give it back to you. That's why they default to links very often. Where chech E beats sort of nailed that. And that's what he and I talked about this week. He says, oh, that was the thing that we just couldn't get to yet when he was building these other assistants. He said, but it was always something I knew we'd need to get to. He said, oh, by the way, the knowing side, GTP, check. It's done. Like it works. And there's a lot of different implementations. But now the thing is, how do you put them together the knowing and the doing? And this is where we started. We were talking about the plugins. Deconfliction, personalization, all the business issues that you have when you got third parties. These are the next challenges. It's not precisely clear that chechi P will be able to get over these or open AL and get over these anytime soon. But it may be it's the knowing assistant right now and maybe it'll become the doing assistant. But one of these assistants soon should be able to say, oh, yes, there is already one. It's jet. Yeah, Chad GPT. Yeah, and the other thing I would say is, as I said, I even asked hugging chat how it differentiates itself from chat GBT and I am taking with a grain of salt because of where I was coming from. But it made a big point talking about personalization and customization and because it's open-source it becomes easier to personalize it or even if it's for limited uses having that option is going to attract a lot of people who want who don't want a big comprehensive conversational AI with general AI, but they just want something that can respond to natural language more quickly to do simple things. And I think there's a market for that too. Yeah, absolutely. And Allen first bird pointed out that it is actually doing some of the doing with the plugins. But we'll see. I haven't had access to it yet. We talk about all these potential problems. I think it will get to some of the doing, but we think it's a really good framework to think about the assistance that we've had up to this point or the doing assistance. This is the knowing assistant that doing assistance are trying to add knowing or they think they're starting to add knowing at some point that knowing assistance or trying to add doing maybe Google having both sides of the coin is going to be the closest to get there, but we need to move on. So this has been fun. We obviously Eric and I have spent a lot of time in this space. And so we can break this down probably as well or better than anybody, very interesting. There's a lot of nuance there. And it's going to play out over time. But here's another thing that we've been looking at a lot over, I think we started writing about deepfakes in like 2018 or something like that. Deep fake and weekend, okay? So we talked about that. I think we talked about that last week, didn't we?.
The CyberWire
European MPs Targeted by Deepfake Video Calls
"Someone impersonating a spokesman for imprisoned russian opposition figure alexander navalny conducted zoom meetings with european parliament members. The sessions featured. What the guardian and nl times called a deepfake video call purporting to be volley associate leonid volkov which volkov himself said looked pretty convincing. Speculation about responsibility for the incident has focused on vo van and lexus. Two well-known russian prank callers pranksters and such nuisance. Humorous are known. The incident is of course troubling for coming at a time when navalny is imprisoned and on a life threatening hunger strike and it's worth noting that relatively senior political officials were taken in by the scam but to place it in perspective. This is more shock jock stuff than it is a spore of new and devilish lena. Various approach to disinformation technically. It's a cut above the kind of jerk who had called the live news coverage to holler bubba buoy during the slow motion. Chase of oj. Simpson's bronco down the four zero five in los angeles but let's keep it in perspective. The lesson is that video that appears genuine alive call need not be and that some authentication beyond look and feel is necessary but we already knew that it's even become atropine gag insurance commercials where there's a guy video conferencing with his move colleague and so forth. At any rate on balance not very funny and vo von alexis themselves aren't novices. We note. they pranked to name. Just three sir. Elton john the duke of sussex and senator bernie sanders but of their targets have been critics of the russian regime. Mr putin himself has not been pranked and seems unlikely to be
Cyber Security Weekly Podcast
Deepfakes, Shallowfakes And Cheapfakes
"Thought we kick off with talking about what is deepfake. Which is kind of i think. Like an urban slang and then there's also and also other terms turnaround like faceswap face reenactment. Fake shallow. what. These are fake. That's the fun of modern existing striped different. Domes created different people so the term deepfake probably has caught on the most. Because kinda for interesting phrase when i was coined but sort of set of pranksters created those images video. They were to kind of fun stewart. One was that. Hey this is a fake image using deep learning. What is deep learning deep. Learning is the name given to one approach to machine learning which uses neural networks and unit. Networks have been around for many decades. They were around when i was a graduate student and we used to laugh at them saying they can really don't do anything interesting. But typically they were redressed and then folks who worked on them kept persisting and the reached a point where we had enough computing capability to create new lennox that had many layers so typically neural network was You input some rector and then they're izzo middle input layers middle layer output layer and These neurons which mimic how the new ron's and the brain are connected. And based on the inputs these all the connections have some weights since some output values created and based on outward value. They will say yes. Some note right so for example simplest examples in those early days was if i give you say the temperature the pressure Whether it's cloudy unawed a tier four features input. I want you to be. I want a new leads to predict whether it'll rain or not. If the number outputs to say less than treasured say ask you say no rain if it's about the assay rain
Right Now with Stephen Kent
"deepfakes" Discussed on Right Now with Stephen Kent
"Visual effects designer chris. You may melted the internet with his deepfake videos of tom cruise. Tom cruise swinging a golf club. Tom cruise doing a magic trick and he's been doing a lot of talking about how he did this but i want to know why so. Thank you chris for being here to answer that very question. Can you tell us a little bit about why you did this video of tom cruise a professional exercise or just showing the world that you can first of all. Thanks for having me. And second of all i wish is having fun. I always do these things to get better. What i'm doing. I want to be the best on what i do. And this was just a good death somehow went viral. And yeah. that's where we are now. That's a very expensive way to have fun right like you do this professionally and i think something a lot of people misunderstand about deepfake taxes. They think it's the same as face swaps on phones. But what you do. On a professional level ext thousands of dollars. Takes hiring a professional actor to do the tom cruise impersonation so like. Can you tell people about the barriers to kind of doing what you're doing because it's more than just fun. Yeah well the actor. I'm working with. I worked with him on another project before. And we were having so much fun like professionally so fun to work with that. He called me after a few weeks later. He told me my chris. We have to do something but just some fun. And that's what people don't. Don't don't underestimate. The talent is actor. Has he's professional expert. He's so good at imitating. Tom cruise the way. He's smiling the way he's doing these weird face with his hands. That's tom cruise. And then if you if you ask me on top of that like with a deepfake and effects is like a small hollywood studio doing these videos. So that's the and especially i also have the hardware and all these things to work with. So that's why it's it's looking at how it looks now like it's it's it's pretty good so it looks like took a lot of stuff to get that done like do you is the first time you've done something like this or have you been doing this for like ever. Well a been focusing. Hey i am deepfake for two and a half years now so it isn't the first time i'm also employed by mad. At the mets parker had sought practice. Were your studio so no ways for awhile. I have to stop you right there. Because i love southbound. I love south park so much weight. So you work there all my gosh like. I'm so jealous can you. I'm not sure if you're loud but if you can. Can you tell me about something you've gotten to do there. Well we released or curved videos a couple of months ago sassy justice. It's like these online. Tv show greatest regraded pilot and is a tv show where every character is a deepfake and donald trump But he's called sassy in our in our pilots east east fighting for justice and he Fighting for out to detect deepfakes like. It's so funny you should watch it. Like it's it's i'm honor to head to to the shanas a big south park and so that is that is an exciting news. I'm trying to think about. When i first started learning in hearing about this tax and i think it has to be honestly from a star wars movie a couple of years ago. Do you remember when rogue one came out and disney basically brought back to life the actor. Peter cushing i'll play grandma tarkhan in star wars rogue one and it. Was this moment where we're like. Are they going to be able to start bringing back actors from the dead. As long as i remember sign off on it and it's like a renaissance an art. I mean chris like it's got to be kind of exciting because you might one day get to work on actors that have passed away. Whose estates or okay with you using their likeness. Have you ever thought thought about that where it might go. Yeah what. I'm when. I'm using this technique. I'm especially looking for creative ways of using it. Not just swapping won't face with another but there are so many things can use for like for example. I'm using a restoration on this old music view of belton. French singer Best away seventies. So i'd deepfake a high-quality interview on top of that music video. It's all his face. And now i've got this four k full colored song of him a piece. It's it's the same man doing the same hormones and so cool just using this technique creative ways it's there are no boundaries and we just don't realize possibilities yet it sounds like you're really passionate about your and that's the thing i always admire people who just love love what they do and it seems you have that. Are there things about your work that you wish either regular people or people sort of interested in this stuff would know about it. Yeah yeah What i do my youtube channel. I'm always trying to show them. What's possible using this technique You can do so many things. Like i imagine. Like an if debut as you could even work on a planet of the apes and you wouldn't need to redeem miles it. Wouldn't he make up. You could do it all in deepfake like there is so many. That's what i try to show to be. Bashes tried to show the glimpse. It's possible and i know that that isn't there yet. Still needs time to get better and an unknown of getting there and you see the potential. And that's what i try to show people and if possible yeah I would like to work on fun stuff as well chris. And you kinda talking about the potential and recently that there's kind of like no boundaries to what can be done here and i think the boundaries thing is what scares people Regulators are looking at how to get involved in deepfake technology. Governments are trying to figure out how to protect against deepfake scandals by militias sort of types or individuals. So i guess. I wanna know not what should governments do. But what would be an overreaction in your mind by governments like what do you think that would be too far in terms of protecting against deepfake scandals and stuff like that well. I'm afraid director just going to talk about banning technology. Altogether like that doesn't make sense. Every new technology is going to scare people and they're always going to eat people miss using this technology. So so i'm just like like i talked told you before the interview like by all these articles about someone is doing a deepfake like every team like even if it's followership. It's all called a deepfake novel. Because that's what people want to think about deepfake it's always a fulling people and.
This Week in Apps
"deepfakes" Discussed on This Week in Apps
CNBC's Fast Money
New Record Highs as Powell Reassures the Market
"Does the market finally. Believe jay powell. Now if you watch us yesterday we asked why no one seems to believe the fed chief when he says rate hikes aren't coming anytime soon but today he couldn't have been clearer powell saying the fed isn't even thinking about thinking about hiking rates until twenty twenty four at the earliest and when they do finally move the market will have ample warning his comments. Reigniting the record rally with the dow. Snp closing at all time high. So does this mean really say it all all right just to reiterate. This is obviously the deepfake. Does it meaning ring. True guy a love. The mimi's shifts are my favorite. And i i guess the answer going back to last night it depends on what market you're talking about. The stock market absolutely believes him. And you know i. I'm somewhat hesitant to say it. But that's something you know. Tim and karen and steven been saying for a long time. Don't fight these guys in the stock market continues on. Its merry way the flip side of that coin. Is you know. Ten year yields are an indication. The bond market doesn't believe him because here we are at north of one point six percent and the ten year so one market does. The other market doesn't right now the. Us equity market is winning and for the purposes of that. Show our show tonight. That's probably good enough at the same time when race. Get high enough tim. We've seen it in the past when they touch six six seven which they did this morning when they go towards one seven The markets have a little bit of a tantrum so even though the bond market may not believe jay powell eventually the stock market's take the lead to the bond market. So the two are back intertwined. So what what do you think the answer at this. Point is jay powell making abundantly clear and clear to the markets market participants. That there is no intention on raising rates until not even forecasted economic metrics come true but they actually have to see it in the present very backward looking very subjective. We've been. Rick rolled twice this week on fast money. So there's a lot going on. And i think you have a case here where also the concept of the the absolute level of of bond yields on the ten year. What point are are equities in trouble. And i think that's maybe a bigger debate on some level because we just don't know i think the conversation that The fed may have lost control of the long end of the curve. Is the right one to have I think from from fed funds obviously out to five or six years. It's pretty clear that Today's action tells you that the fed is able to job. Here's something else about today. People aren't really talking about. They're out there saying they're going to continue to buy at least eighty billion treasuries and forty billion mortgage backs. At least so again the size of the bond tapering Is something that's also really tough to understand especially when the fed really upgraded the economy Tells you that four and a half percent unemployment rate by the end of twenty twenty one From not terribly far off the record lows that we you know of all time that we went into the pandemic with his still not good. Enough so let. The fed was very clear today. I'm most troubled by vicks. That's got a one thousand nine handle honestly fell eight percent and the volatility. This low tells me equities actually should be a little bit weary in the next couple of days. We're pre pandemic levels when it comes to the vix karen on what did you make it today and does it. Change your view on the markets. Well i'm always long. But i just have this image of of j. palace saying you know what i've taken the bull market hostage. I'm not gonna hurt the bull market in the bond market yelling electable market. Go and then. Powell says if anybody makes a sudden move the market dies and i think that's sort of a standoff that he's trying to reach with the bond market right we saw briefly would happen last month in a lot of weird things the mark you got a lot of sudden movements and the stock market really didn't like that at all but you know tiven guy said he couldn't have been more clear about how dovish he is now. I don't know if the data will force him to do something earlier he did. Say we're not gonna do it until the data makes us do it but if we start to see data change well then we'll have to think all right. He could be made to do it sooner. i don't really know i don't. It wasn't so shocking to me that the general rhetoric. I don't think it was so shocking to anyone but good for banks good for. I guess it was no giants surprise. More dovish than i thought but certainly we all thought that he was dovish going in. I had actually. I want to hear what he has to say about the supplemental leverage ratio. that's important for banks but he punted on that and rice and a couple of days. What he has to say about that is he. Did you say yeah twice. They've made it very clear he wasn't gonna say anything they're gonna say something in a couple of weeks and he's not gonna say anything about it anytime
Kottke Ride Home
Should The Simpsons Cast Be Replaced With AI Voice "Actors"?
"With most of the actors who voiced characters on the simpsons well into retirement age and the show seemingly having no intention of ever stopping a meeting. Cut wallover at wired. Uk wondered. could the actors all be replaced with a i rep locations. It makes a bit of sense off the bat. Near the proliferation of deepfakes circulating online aside major movie franchises have increasingly been patching together old footage of actors who have passed away like carrie fisher and the rise of skywalker and paul walker and furious. Seven or even just to fabricate a younger version of an actor who coincidentally had an entire body of work from their teenage years to use as reference points like robert. Downey junior in captain. America's civil war and will smith in jimmy man and with the simpsons. You only have to create the voice shortly. that's far easier especially with over three decades of content to pull from wired turn to tim. Mixed smithers canada-based. Ai researcher and media producer. Who builds a speech model that can be trained to mimic anyone's voice and notably has already recreated homer simpson for a few youtube videos including one where homer stands in for julia roberts in notting hill. Here's how he does it. Quoting wired mic smithers built generic. Ai model that can turn any text into audio speech in english when he wants to make a new voice he tunes the model further with two or three hours of new data of that particular person. Speaking along with a text transcript it focuses in on what makes a homer voice a homer voice and the different frequencies. He says after that it's a matter of asking the model to generate multiple takes. Each one will vary slightly and choosing the best one for your purposes and quotes bonnets. The performance is pretty flat as wired. Says it's quote as if he's reading out something that he doesn't really understand the meaning of and quotes which is pretty apt for homer still in the hut the performance. The show would probably be looking for there are other startups around. The world. Likes an antic in the uk and replica studios in australia. That are working to add. Some of that emotional resonance to a voice is using actual actors to help train them performing different lines over and over again with different emotional tones. Technically if you had someone recite all the existing phonemes in the english language or redescendu since that contained them all you should be able to then piece together any possible words. He wants but in reality. People's accents emotions can change things just slightly enough to make the process exceptionally challenging. Although absolutely doable and the time it takes to train the ai decreases over time with more data. Both semantic and replica studios who work primarily with video games where. There's a lot of intriguing possibilities with things like getting a character to say the player's name or whatever. The player wants them to or having a i basically work as a stand in until a real actor comes on board both of those companies say the actors they work with get paid anytime their voices are used in a game and this is a key element for me. Not just what rights doesn't actor have if they're only ever used to train in ai and not perform roll themselves so to speak but taking this back to the simpsons what rights do actors have whose voices are recreated to be their characters the screen actors guild affords actors certain bargaining rights over the use of their likeness. Which does explicitly extend to a performer's voice and while his protection is being rapidly expanded and reexamined as technology evolves you can impart think crispin glover for its origins after crispin glover declined to revive his role as george mic. Fly in back to the future. Part two they technically recast him. But they saddled the new actor. Geoffrey wiseman with prosthetics and employed classic stage tricks like having him upside down or wearing sunglasses to obscure his features as well as the use of some footage of glover himself from the first movie. Unless you were well aware that glover hadn't returned for the sequel. You probably wouldn't have had any idea that the george mcphee racine was any different from the first movie so glover sued the producers for using his likeness without his permission and for not paying him for the use of the footage. He shot for the first movie. But the legality of all of this now banned far beyond simply using a performance likeness and in many cases. Who is allowed to do what isn't so clear. There's copyright law which could give authority to the studio or whoever owns the rights but that counteracts with the right to publicity basically crispin glover thing and that's especially tenuous with cast as well known as the ones from the simpsons. You know a lot of people know these actors and if in a i replicated homer were out there. Advertising for some product people might assume dan castellaneta who voices homer is endorsing the product even if he had nothing to do with it so it's a tricky path to tread and personally. I'm a bit wary about the idea of ai. Replacing actors were any type of artists. Mean that's not to say that i don't want. Ai involved in arts. I think various tech can produce really rad art. I just don't think it can replace human-made arts and especially with something like the simpsons you know on the one hand. It's been on so long that it's the perfect fodder for ai. Replicated voices because then it could live on beyond the actors. And i guess honor them in some way but on the other hand. It's been so long that there are countless voice actors out there who can nail the characters voices perfectly and probably with more emotion.
TechtalkRadio
Deepfake technology: Can you spot what's real?
"I'm andy taylor. And i'm justin. Lemme and it is the three of us today. There is a lot of tech to talk about. I think the big thing that a lot of people have been talking about this week number one for themselves and number one by just pure astonishment is the technology of deepfake technology. We talked about this a couple months ago. Well you know we. We talked about some deepfakes and all that stuff. But this is how it's it's rear its ugly head again and it's back with a vengeance ugly it looks. It looks so good. it's ugly for society because it does look so good and it's so confusing. I think you're talking about the tom. Cruise ones right yeah. You're the one who told me about it. Because i hadn't seen it yet and it appeared on tiktok amazing because tiktok it. They have a policy no deepfakes. They don't want deepfakes on on tiktok and this was posted on tiktok and eleven million views by people. Saying wait a minute. Tom cruise is doing a magic trick. Tom cruise's played golf. And he's put it he's on tiktok and people were watching and the thing is. You really can't tell that. It's not tom cruise. And that's that's what makes it rough those of you don't know what a deepfake is a deepfake. Is you get an act. I have an actor but a person anybody it could be anybody to be the The video portion of it. And then you'll be walking around a room or doing something. But then you're going to upload know of everybody can do this because it does require some sophisticated technology but you upload like a celebrities face in different poses which gets a bunch of different pictures of that celebrity and then you for lack of better term you superimposed that celebrities face on the quote unquote actors body and it becomes that person. This technology can basically turn anybody into somebody else now. We we've seen some deepfakes in the past that have featured celebrities but always like kind of a little switch. And i've liked those. I've been entertained by those where you have stallone as the terminator or bill hater which is one of the best ones out there. I think bill hader while. He's he's on. One of the talk shows transforms into tom cruise and transforms into seth rogan. While he's i love that one. That one's a lot of fun and they're fun but this deepfake was different because it wasn't like this is another celebrity trying to be another celebrity. This is like oh this. Is tom cruise. Which makes everybody think. Oh that's tom cruise. It brings up the idea then. Okay could a politician then be created to see something outrageous or yeah. That's what i was about to say is like people say how could be a threat to society. just imagine. Just imagine that somebody does somehow does a deepfake of president biden announcing war on china. china's somehow sees this and says well no no no no no where declaring war in america and launches their nukes. Not possible but oh it is possible now that technology fake the technology yet totally and it can also in the case of crime. We've got footage of this crime going down this person did. That's not me. That's a deepfake. There's in could be used as the defense could be used as maybe putting somebody up. That is innocent of a crime. I mean it's you say that there is a technology that you found out that is now being developed to combat the deepfakes like basically be able to tell if it was altered a company. And i'm the name kind of escaped me. I signed up to kind of follow them and see what they're doing but they're apparently able to use technology to determine similar like what people have done now with photoshop. Be has been able to set now that you can tell that's photoshop. You can see that but now this company is going to work with the some of these deepfake videos and see they can determine but again. The technology is getting so good but people have said. Well we don't have the expertise to do it ourselves. But we're beginning to see that changing as
Cyber Security Headlines
Microsoft announces passwordless authentication in Azure
"Microsoft announced his end to end encryption support for teams plus password list loggins microsoft announced that it is adding end to end encryption support to microsoft teams later this year at its ignite conference yesterday. It stated that preview of end to end encryption teams will be available in the first half of this year for commercial customers it will be available for one to one unscheduled teams calls and is designed for more sensitive conversations. This is something that its main competitor. Slack does not currently have microsoft also announced that it is making password list lugging a standard feature for as your active directory. A cloud based service customers can use to handle their employees logging chores. Us unprepared for a competition with china. Commission finds a comprehensive report released this week by the national security commission on artificial intelligence states that white house leadership and a substantial investment will both be needed to ensure us superiority in artificial intelligence by twenty twenty five commission. Chair and former. Google chief executive eric schmidt said he believes china is catching the. Us up on a initiatives proposed by the commission include the creation of technology competitive council within the white house to be chaired by the vice president. A steering committee on emerging technology within the defense department to coordinate an advance implementation of technology and d creation of an accredited degree granting digital services academy to help build a pipeline of civil service tech tyrant. Tom cruise deepfake videos rattled security. Experts three mysterious deepfake videos of tom cruise. That have gone. viral on. Tiktok are the handiwork of chris. Ume a video visual effects specialist from belgium. The videos have drawn attention from experts and non experts alike for being among the most convincing. Examples of the genre of fake videos yet produced deepfakes created using artificial intelligence that uses a technique to train to neural networks in tandem to either create or identify facial imagery while some technologists security experts. Fear deepfakes will become a potent weapon for political disinformation. Chris downplays such concerns saying quote consumers. Just need to become more skeptical of what they see and quote carmen. Ransomware makes it easy and cheap to launch attacks. A new ransomware. Do it yourself. Kit called carmen k. A. r. m. e. n. Is making it easy. For one of these cybercriminals to launch ransomware attacks packaged with small loader and also small in size it can detect if it is operating in a sandbox environments and can automatically delete portions of its code to prevent security researchers from analyzing it carmen scrambled files with eighty s. Two fifty six bit encryption and operates with minimal connections to its command and control server as a ransomware as a service product. Carmen automates many processes including payment processing so users can concentrate on distributing the rent somewhere at one hundred and seventy five dollars. Carmen lowers the barrier to entry to the ransomware market.
The Mason Minute
Deepfake (MM #3509)
"The Maisonette with Kevin Nation. Have you heard about the latest technology that's taking over the Internet maybe not taking over yet, but it's getting there called Em Up fake technology. I'm sure you've seen it in some apps you played around with like the faceapp deepfake technology is getting more and more visibility. Thanks to the creators of South Park who created a little YouTube series called sassy Justice Thayer just playing around with deep fakes. They've got a reporter who has the face of Donald Trump, but if somebody else has the face of Al Gore, but if somebody else has the face of Jared Kushner, but if somebody else they're using it for satire. They're using it for fun. Of course. I'm thinking yeah sure. It's fun and it's cute now, but what's the danger deepfake technology has been used previously in movies and all the technology is getting easier and easier for more people to play with and of course when the fun starts off the bad people start coming in and Wile deepfake technology is fun for satire and playing around with apps on your social media. The bad people are about to come in and start causing a whole lot of trouble. We can't have all the fun things because somebody's got to come in and ruin it for us.
The Mason Minute
Deepfake (MM #3509)
"The Maisonette with Kevin Nation. Have you heard about the latest technology that's taking over the Internet maybe not taking over yet, but it's getting there called Em Up fake technology. I'm sure you've seen it in some apps you played around with like the faceapp deepfake technology is getting more and more visibility. Thanks to the creators of South Park who created a little YouTube series called sassy Justice Thayer just playing around with deep fakes. They've got a reporter who has the face of Donald Trump, but if somebody else has the face of Al Gore, but if somebody else has the face of Jared Kushner, but if somebody else they're using it for satire. They're using it for fun. Of course. I'm thinking yeah sure. It's fun and it's cute now, but what's the danger deepfake technology has been used previously in movies and all the technology is getting easier and easier for more people to play with and of course when the fun starts off the bad people start coming in and Wile deepfake technology is fun for satire and playing around with apps on your social media. The bad people are about to come in and start causing a whole lot of trouble. We can't have all the fun things because somebody's got to come in and ruin it for us.
The Mason Minute
Deepfake (MM #3509)
"The Maisonette with Kevin Nation. Have you heard about the latest technology that's taking over the Internet maybe not taking over yet, but it's getting there called Em Up fake technology. I'm sure you've seen it in some apps you played around with like the faceapp deepfake technology is getting more and more visibility. Thanks to the creators of South Park who created a little YouTube series called sassy Justice Thayer just playing around with deep fakes. They've got a reporter who has the face of Donald Trump, but if somebody else has the face of Al Gore, but if somebody else has the face of Jared Kushner, but if somebody else they're using it for satire. They're using it for fun. Of course. I'm thinking yeah sure. It's fun and it's cute now, but what's the danger deepfake technology has been used previously in movies and all the technology is getting easier and easier for more people to play with and of course when the fun starts off the bad people start coming in and Wile deepfake technology is fun for satire and playing around with apps on your social media. The bad people are about to come in and start causing a whole lot of trouble. We can't have all the fun things because somebody's got to come in and ruin it for us.
The 3:59
Deepfakes' biggest threat to the 2020 US election isn't what you'd think
"So we've all heard of deep fix but you don't think there's actually a real risk in say candid footage of Joe Biden. Donald trump actually saying something crazy and swing voters. What's real danger deep fix with this election? The Deepak experts that I talk to yes. They said that they're not most worried about a candidate depict like that like something where Donald Trump or Joe Biden is admitting to a hot button. Crime or saying something really inflammatory with. They're more concerned about are two things. One is known as the Liars Dividend. And that's this concept that as more people know that the fakes exists that there can be these completely false highly realistic out there. It gives people who are caught in the act and are guilty more credibility when they deny something when they denial legit video by saying. Oh you heard deep fix. You can't trust what you see anymore. And that just muddies the waters and makes it harder for people to understand and trust what is truth. And what is fiction?
The 3:59
The surprising danger that deepfakes pose to the presidential elections
"Deep fakes. Those digital manipulated videos. That look scary. Real pose a threat to the upcoming presidential election. Real danger will surprise you. I'm Roger Chang and this is your daily charge me reporter John Salesman. Thanks for joining me Joan. Yeah it's great to be back on the daily charge so we've all heard of deep fix but you don't think there's actually a real risk in say candid footage of Joe Biden. Donald trump actually saying something crazy and swing voters. What's real danger deep fix with this election? The Deepak experts that I talk to yes. They said that they're not most worried about a candidate depict like that like something where Donald Trump or Joe Biden is admitting to a hot button. Crime or saying something really inflammatory with. They're more concerned about are two things. One is known as the Liars Dividend. And that's this concept that as more people know that the fakes exists that there can be these completely false highly realistic out there. It gives people who are caught in the act and are guilty more credibility when they deny something when they denial legit video by saying. Oh you heard deep fix. You can't trust what you see anymore. And that just muddies the waters and makes it harder for people to understand and trust what is truth. And what is fiction? Yeah that's that sounds very dangerous because that's like it damages the credibility of basically everything right. Because if you could point to this one thing is oh see this fake. It applies to everything essentially right. Yeah it makes it harder. You know we. Our brains have been wired for so long to believe what we see. And we've learned to you. Know as Photoshop came along and as other sorts of media manipulation have come a long. We've been able to catch up and at least be more skeptical of those but because video is tricking your eyes and your ears because the AI that powers depicts is so sophisticated and so good and making things look real. That's really really deep wiring in your brain telling you all these signals like trust this. Trust this trust this and so when people start saying. Hey you can't trust that anymore. It just means that it's harder for anyone to understand what's even real and speaking of the AI aspect of things you have a nice breakdown of how deep fix work like how how are these videos created defects are created by a kind of artificial intelligence called Ganz that's short for generative adversarial networks and the the the basic way that they work is they have to neural networks. Networks are a kind of learning. That's based on how the kind of inspired by how the brain works so imagine that these two neural networks are actually an artist and an art critic and they're locked in rooms right next to each other. The artist creates a painting trying to make something that looks like a masterpiece. And he shuffles that painting into a stack of other paintings that actually are works by the go or we're in war or whatever they take that stack moving into art critics room and art critic picks out which ones he thinks are a forgeries. The ones that aren't the real masterpieces. That feedback goes back to the artists and the artists gets better and better and better at figuring out how to make a really convincing fake masterpiece up to the point where he's able to he or she is able to. This artificial neural network is able to make something that can trick the critic into thinking that what is fake is actually real. That's how these sort of artificial intelligence systems work. So I mean that sounds complicated by no love this kind of working superfast background but how easy is it for someone to actually make a deep? Do It depends what kind of deep lake we're talking about. You know there are open source tools to make the kind of celebrity face swaps the Elon. Musk sauna babies had sort of thing. They're open source tool sick at that. They're not as easy. Those aren't as easy to make us like a meam or an animated Gif. You need to have technological savvy Know How to get. You need to have a pretty powerful computer you need. Large data sets unique things. That are more difficult than like making taking a photo putting some white text on it of course so those are berry accessible with are kind of acceptable. But what we're talking about here talking about election defects now. These are the kind of things all the experts that I talked to say. You know we have a lower hurdle to suspend disbelief when we're looking at Elon. Musk space on a baby. But when you're presented with a video of a candidate for president or the president of the United States we have a luckily human beings. Have they kind of set a higher bar that you have to clear to actually believe that it's true so what that means is kind of very sophisticated high end e fix that would threaten on election? Those are really reserved for people that work at universities or research centres powerful computers or state actors that have that kind of computing power like China at their disposal. So the idea here. That Kennedy fakes are less of a risk. Like what are some of the defects? We should be worried about what people are more worried about aren't necessarily these candidates it's more an a deep lake that attacks your faith in the election rather than your trust in a candidate so instead of having what are the reasons is at the state in our political discourse where we're very divided. I think everyone agrees that we're divided and our our opinions seem more entrenched than they had before and so in that environment it's harder to convince or sway voters either way with a fake video. You know like if you were to make a video of Donald Trump's hair flying off or something like it will only solidify your beliefs if you liked on trump you'll be like that's a fake. I like Donald Trump. Even more. If you don't like him you'll be like he looks Tom. I dislike them even more. And so a more cunning way to use a deep fake to disrupt the US election would be to create a deep fake of say like an authoritative news anchor or a governor or authority. Figure who not as many people know saying things like. We're in the age of Kobe. Nineteen we have marsh. It's two days before election martial law. You cannot go to your polling place or to create like news. Anchors saying there There are you know there are some sort of you. Know armed militants some sort of supremacists or militants. That are arming themselves. Going to polling places in a specific neighborhood these kind of people need to be scared about showing up to vote and in that way you can suppress votes and you can also after the vote undermine people's faith in the result if you have an authoritative figure saying something about how we have footage of vote-switching from trump to Biden That could so this sort of distrust not only in going to the election but after the election in the results themselves. That's an interesting point because it's it's not necessarily like a defect that would make Joe Biden. Say something like I killed the spurs like this is these are actually kind of believable is right. I think that's your point like this is a lot more coming. It's lot a lot more nuance but I think. That's what makes the lila easier to swallow the fact that it is all what you're saying. It's pretty plausible sounded. Yeah and the other thing to keep in mind. Is that a candidate. Deep fake would. It's kind of like this Yin and Yang. Were like the the head of the snake is eating the tail like a candidate. D. Fake would only be successful if it basically goes viral and lots of people see it right but when it goes viral. One thing that the. Us has say what you will about the US press core. We have a robust free Press we have a robust free press entrenched in our country other countries where there are dictatorships or more emerging democracies. They don't have that quite at their disposal as much as we do. So if a candidate of the president or Joe Biden were to come out. We do have the capacity here built into our democracy to have a force of people trying quickly as possible. To debunk it. Whereas if you were somebody that wanted to make a deep fake that could actually just robbed or suppress boats. It would be more successful if it doesn't go viral if it's not something that draws the attention of an entire press corps. That's entirely focused on this on this election. And so and that way could also kind of be the most successful not going viral kind of existing on the radar enough to disrupt people in say one or two counties that are really important in a swing states. And that wouldn't draw the attention of a national press corps debunk it well defects captial of tension and headlines is really just sort of one way to manipulate the Info right like this. We're looking at it a little bit too narrow. If we're just focusing on defects is that is that the case. Yeah you know. It's it makes sense that people would be scared of depicts because you know as we talked about earlier it. It undermines the species assumption. That if I see it I can believe it. And so that's why. There's a lot of fear around deep fakes and what they could pinch the harm that could potentially cause but the reality is you know because of some of these things we talked before about. How really sophisticated deep picks are still inaccessible to a wide right of people? That's not true for like you said memes for slowing down video like the Pelosi sounding drunk video that went viral. Those are kinds of media manipulations. Sometimes people refer to them as shallow fakes or cheap. Fix that have the power of being cheap easy and still incredibly effective. And so. That's why you know. One of the Edward Snowden slayer. Aclu lawyer this comparison. He said that you know looking at election information manipulation by only looking at depict looking at it through a straw. You're just not seeing. You're seeing something really scary. But you're not seeing the much. Bigger picture of how things could be disrupted in twenty twenty oxygen. Russia played a big role in. You know clouding the two thousand sixteen elections with misinformation disinformation. And you know you talked about how it takes a lot of resources for these fakes to be effective. Obviously Russia's a country with a lot of resources like should we should we be worried about Russia antiques. Well so I talked to one expert on the national security locations of depicts his. Name's Clint Watts. He testified to Congress. He testified to senators about just the sort of thing and he says you know anything's possible but Russia and their disinformation tactics. They are more skilled at the art of this information than they are at the science of deep fakery so they although anything's possible. Russia has lots of oil money could always who knows what Russia could do. But he's more interested in the potential in China or other places China in particular as a place. Where China has you know. They have supercomputers I think Stephen Shanklin expert on nonstop. He always has that but I think they have. More supercomputers than we have in the US or whatever compute they've got lots of supercomputers which is important for making the takes no for sure beyond supercomputers they've invested heavily artificial intelligence. The one leads in the world in a appear that neural network. That's that stuff is a recipe for a lot of potential problems. Down the line. Yeah in China they have completely synthetic television personalities like deep fake news anchors so that a very authoritative anchor can report on something without actually take time out of his day to report on it The fact that a country like that if if they wanted to do that then they could They are the ones that are in the best position to create a deep fake That would disrupt global geopolitics. But you know. State actors could create other kinds of deep fakes. That could cause other kinds of problems. Those are in the world so you know it's just doomsday scenario. No matter how you look at it well that's that's glorious and very positive Just lastly I mean I think we can all figure out that Elon. Musk is not really a baby. But are there giving advice for for like how despotic fake. Or or just a you know how to be a little bit more vigilant when looking at some of the content that surfaces around the web. Yeah so I asked everyone. I talk to you all the extra Saturday. I asked this question. And there's no silver bullet like little loophole that you can find for understanding it's fake For debunking it on your own. If it's a real deep fake than your eyes won't save you like watching it. You won't be able to tell that it's like that's the whole point of a defense that it's an AI. Created where the power of this artificial intelligence outstrips like. Our brains are very attuned human faces. But they're not so fast that they can keep up with how well deep fake technology can progress. And so you know. We don't have computers in our brains that are as powerful as supercomputers at research universities So the advice for normal people that are like hey how do I even know of this fake? It really comes down to like basic hygiene about what you're exposed to if you see a video and it seems like it's so outlandish that it couldn't be true than might not be and if you see a video that is clearly something trying to appeal to some person some segments inflammatory instincts. That's also reason to be skeptical defects just mean. Everyone needs to do what we should be doing with other kinds of manipulated media slowdown. And think before you share. It's hard to do and it's even harder when we're talking about deep ix but it's just as important to act that way what you're presented with a really realistic video as you would be if you presented with a mean or like a cheap slowed down video of a drunk. Nancy Pelosi Right. Yeah well. That's good advice in general whether it's an article or D do a little bit of Homework. Thinks through what you're actually looking at
Techmeme Ride Home
Google’s much improved Pixel Buds are finally here
"Back when the pixel phones were refreshed. You might remember that. Google announced the hundred and seventy nine dollars. Second Gen Pixel Bud wireless ear buds. They were to be Google's first. True wireless ear buds eliminating that fabric tether that the first generation had and the emphasis at the time was on the hands. Free Google assistant voice control capabilities. However they weren't immediately made available delayed for six months or something as Google said at the time. Well it's been six months. It's spring and finally. The new Pixel Buds are here and at the Verge Chris. Welsh says. The design is much improved. Wireless charging is cool. Google assistant works well and the sound quality is very good. However one small caveat quote new to this iteration as soft stabiliser arc. Think of it like a silicone fin on each earbud. That's meant to help the Pixel buds stay anchored in your ears. I had no issues with comfort. But we've been testing a few pairs of Pixel Buds and dinner and Becca. Bo said the ARC caused some soreness during extended listening and quote. I should describe this. It's not a silicon thin. That goes around the outside of your ear. It's actually it tucks inside your kind ear canal a little bit. I can see how if your ears aren't shaped correctly. That would be a little uncomfortable. So I know if that's a deal breaker or not I guess it depends on your ear and I mean one advantage of the design is the fact that you don't have anything dangling from your head if you'll recall that does mean it sort of looks like you've got Frankenstein. Monster style bolts in your ears. But I guess that's an a weirder than any other design that's out there. And frankly the coolest application of these things remains the ability to use google. Translate in real time if you're traveling. And Encountering Foreign Tongues Chris's conclusion in his review. Was this quote at one. Hundred seventy nine dollars. The Pixel Buds are priced at the same level as Jabra's elite seventy five t ear buds. Which is still personally pick over these for their more dynamic sound and because you don't miss out on features depending on what phone you have. There's unsurprisingly no pixel buds APP for IOS. But if Google assistant has a decent sized presence in your life you might be willing to make do with the downsides of Google's new ear buds lacking base and the occasional swell in outside noise for the convenience of being able to call upon it anytime anywhere