As AI becomes more powerful, crypto become more practical
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Recently, the famous YouTuber Lao Gao uploaded a video introducing Web3.0 and expressed optimism about the long-term development of blockchain and its applications. In just a few days, the video has already surpassed 2.5 million views, which is more than the total number of listens accumulated by the Blocktrend podcast in three years. Quite impressive! 😂 However, many experts have criticized the video's content as completely inaccurate. One of the criticisms is that Lao Gao included AI in the scope of Web3.0, which has made it difficult for many people to understand.
Although his views differ from those of most people and there are indeed many incorrect statements in the video, AI and Web3 are closely related and complement each other. The Block Times has previously discussed the chaining of digital content, which will help to identify whether the content is produced by AI. The focus of this article, however, is on cryptocurrencies. As AI becomes more convenient, the practicality of cryptocurrencies increases. Let's start with the latest developments in AI.
Outdated travel plans
Qingming holiday is coming soon. Have you planned where to travel? In the past few years, I have been accustomed to opening Skyscanner or KKday to find inspiration and go wherever there are tickets. However, this type of travel has only emerged in recent years.
10 years ago, the well-known low-cost airlines were established one after another, which greatly changed the way people travel. People went from signing up for package tours to buying flights and accommodations separately for free and easy trips, or customizing local experiences for the entire trip. The more things that need to be arranged, the more it tests the planner's ability to integrate information.
One of the biggest challenges of free and easy trips is doing homework. In addition to searching for information online, people may have to go to a bookstore to find several travel guides when planning their itinerary. After collecting all the information on accommodation, transportation, attractions, etc., they can start arranging the order of the itinerary, calculating expenses, and completing bookings and payments one by one.
From searching, planning, to booking, every step is interconnected. Even by 2023, the process hasn't gotten much easier. Although travel guides have been replaced by YouTubers or travel bloggers, and the creators' output speed has increased significantly, everyone knows that the information becomes outdated the moment it is uploaded. Even if you immediately book flights and accommodations after watching a video or reading a blog post, it is impossible to reproduce the prices and itineraries presented in the content.
That was until last week when ChatGPT introduced a brand new service — ChatGPT Plugins — which solves this problem. In the future, when people plan their trips, they can directly ask ChatGPT to write a fresh travel guide based on the latest information available online. Not only is all the information up-to-date, but ChatGPT can also help book the itinerary. This is an unprecedented innovation.
Real-time travel guides
For example, if you want to travel abroad recently but have a limited budget, you can ask ChatGPT to arrange a 5-day, 4-night trip that does not exceed 30,000 units of currency. AI will use Expedia and KAYAK to help you find the tickets, accommodations, and experiences that meet your criteria and arrange the itinerary based on the travel destination. It's like having a highly efficient personal secretary, except that you can't directly pay for the bookings with cryptocurrencies.
If ChatGPT is a brain, the plugins are like adding eyes and hands to that brain, allowing ChatGPT not only to search for the latest information online but also to directly complete service bookings. According to OpenAI's description:
Language models today, while useful for a variety of tasks, are still limited. The only information they can learn from is their training data. This information can be out-of-date and is one-size fits all across applications. Furthermore, the only thing language models can do out-of-the-box is emit text. This text can contain useful instructions, but to actually follow these instructions you need another process.
Though not a perfect analogy, plugins can be “eyes and ears” for language models, giving them access to information that is too recent, too personal, or too specific to be included in the training data. In response to a user’s explicit request, plugins can also enable language models to perform safe, constrained actions on their behalf, increasing the usefulness of the system overall.
We expect that open standards will emerge to unify the ways in which applications expose an AI-facing interface.
Currently, ChatGPT's website still has a warning stating that its knowledge is limited to events occurring after 2021 and that it cannot answer the latest current affairs questions. I had firsthand experience of this when planning a trip recently.
The image below shows the budget hotels in Busan, South Korea, recommended by ChatGPT. Although it lists the names of various hotels and detailed reasons for their recommendation, I found that the second hotel, Citadines Haeundae Busan, had actually announced its permanent closure two years ago. Moreover, ChatGPT could not confirm the availability of rooms at these hotels for me.
Using ChatGPT to plan a trip feels like going back 10 years to borrowing outdated travel books from the library, even if you finish reading the whole book, you still need to spend time checking one by one. But the new ChatGPT plug-in component allows it to instantly search for information on the Internet, use online tools like a human, and even add items directly to the shopping cart.
This can be said to be a great blessing for family trips.
Family trips can sometimes be made unpleasant due to itinerary arrangements. Many itineraries can be very complex and require a lot of time and effort to re-plan. Now with the help of ChatGPT, everyone can leave the hassle to the AI, no matter how many changes or additional conditions they want to make. Its practicality is definitely much higher than the "Three Treasures of Marriage" (dishwasher, floor cleaner, washer-dryer). However, this is still not the perfect experience, as ChatGPT currently lacks the final critical step - payment.
Even if ChatGPT produces a perfect itinerary, if the user cannot make payment and book immediately, the information will become "outdated". The ideal situation is that ChatGPT can be combined with open payment systems like cryptocurrencies, so that users can complete the booking and payment directly in the process of talking to ChatGPT. All in one go.
Open payment systems
The video below is another scenario demonstrated by OpenAI. A vegetarian in San Francisco asked ChatGPT to recommend a vegetarian restaurant and a vegetarian recipe. He wanted to dine at the restaurant on Saturday and cook at home on Sunday. The recipe needed to calculate the calories and directly add the ingredients to the online shopping cart.
ChatGPT found a restaurant with available seats on Saturday through OpenTable, calculated the calorie content of the ingredients through Wolfram Alpha, and finally added the ingredients to the Instacart shopping cart. However, whether it's booking a restaurant or checking out a shopping cart, ChatGPT only stays at the last step. The user still needs to connect to the website to complete the operation, which is a pity.
I believe that in the future, platforms like Coinbase or websites like CoinMarketCap will definitely develop ChatGPT plug-in components that can look up the prices of cryptocurrencies, helping users calculate how much BTC, ETH, or USDC they need to pay for the products in their shopping cart. Cryptocurrencies are open payment systems, just like people paying in cash, users do not need to log in in advance to complete checkout. As long as the platform is willing to support cryptocurrency payments, users have the opportunity to complete all operations in one stop in ChatGPT without asking any intermediaries.
This is closer to the goal that OpenAI hopes to achieve - not just providing text for users to refer to, but providing feasible solutions based on current data, and ultimately helping people complete more work.
Media coverage of ChatGPT and cryptocurrency is still focused on asking ChatGPT for investment recommendations. This is similar to the 2010 German aquarium inviting "Octopus Paul" to predict the results of the World Cup, which even if correct, was just a lucky guess. In the future, people will gradually realize that when AI becomes omnipotent, internet-native and programmable money flow - cryptocurrency - will become increasingly important.
Cryptocurrency investors may have originally seen the potential for decentralized growth, but now they are also indirectly betting on the future development of AI.
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