Facebook is building towards a Metaverse version of the Internet, in both its hardware and software efforts. What are the implications? And further, how does one acquire status, work, and social capital in such a world? We explore the recent NFT avatar projects through the lens of Ivy League universities and CFA exams to understand some timeless cultural trends.
We’ve had this write-up in some various mental states floating around for a while, and better done than perfect. So treat this as a core idea to be fleshed out later.
Payments and banking companies should be looking at how people purchase and store digital goods and digital currency in video games. That experience has been polished over 40 years, and is what will be the default expectation for future generations.
For those interested, here is a website that collects user experiences of shopping across hundreds of designs.
This week, we look at a breakthrough artificial intelligence release from OpenAI, called GPT-3. It is powered by a machine learning algorithm called a Transformer Model, and has been trained on 8 years of web-crawled text data across 175 billion parameters. GPT-3 likes to do arithmetic, solve SAT analogy questions, write Harry Potter fan fiction, and code CSS and SQL queries. We anchor the analysis of these development in the changing $8 trillion landscape of our public companies, and the tech cold war with China.
The structure of capital markets precedes the innovations that come from it. High frequency trading, passive ETF investing, SPACs, and crypto assets all telegraphed their value proposition before becoming large and meaningful in scale. We are now seeing a new market shape emerge, one that starts with community and builds up into financial instruments that are cultural and social. This analysis looks at the most recent developments in the overlap between decentralized social and cultural work and related financial features.
The evolution towards a financial metaverse is rapidly accelerating, with the growth in generative assets, profile picture avatars, the emerging derivative structures that build on their foundation, and DAOs that govern them. This article highlights the most novel developments, and builds the case for what a digital wallet / bank will need to be able to do in order to succeed on the way to this alien destination.
The image is taken from an AI paper which explains how to use generative adversarial networks (i.e., GANs) to hallucinate hyper realistic-imagery. By training on hundreds of thousands of samples, the model is able to create candidates representing things like “just a normal dude holding a normal fish nothing to see here”, and then edit out the ones that are too egregious.
The reason the stuff above is so scary is actually that you can mathematically transition in the space between images. So for example, you could move between “a normal dude” and “just a normal fish” and have nightmare fish people. Or you could create a DNA root for an image which is part dog, part car, and part jellyfish. Check out the video below and the very accessible https://www.artbreeder.com/ website to see what I mean.
Instead, we are going to tap again into a new development in Art and Neural Networks as a metaphor of where AI progress sits today, and what is feasible in the years to come. For our 2019 “initiation” on this topic with foundational concepts, see here. Today, let’s talk about OpenAI’s CLIP model, connecting natural language inputs with image search navigation, and the generative neural art models like VQ-GAN.
Compared to GPT-3, which is really good at generating language, CLIP is really good at associating language with images through adjacent categories, rather than by training on an entire image data set.
What we know intuitively, and what the software shows, is that the pixelated image can be expanded into a cone of multiple probable outcomes. The same pixelated face can yield millions of various, uncanny permutations. These mathematical permutations of our human flesh exit in an area which is called “latent space”. The way to pick one out of the many is called “gradient descent”.
Imagine you are standing in an open field, and see many beautiful hills nearby. Or alternately, imagine you are standing on a hill, looking across the rolling valleys. You decide to pick one of these valleys, based on how popular or how close it is. This is gradient descent, and the valley is the generated face. Which way would you go?
In this conversation, we talk with Beatriz Helena Ramos – artist, entrepreneur, film director, producer and illustrator – the mind behind DADA.art. DADA is “a space where everything is about cooperation and solidarity, which are amazing ways to allow self-expression, as well as constant inspiration. Additionally, we provide simple tools to encourage creativity, and erase intimidation.”
More specifically, we discuss Beatriz’s journey to creating DADA, decentralized power structures, community-inspired creative collaboration, assymetric rewards in NFT markets driving new value distribution methodologies, DADA’s latest project called “The Invisible Economy”, and technology-inspired and centric approaches to empower artists in the future.
