Should AI have unfettered access to money? The Lightning Network does exactly that, and provides a mechanism for AI to create a wallet, earn money and then spend money on other services in order to complete a task.

To paraphrase Lyn Alden’s August newsletter: “An AI agent is purposely set up by the creator to have some funds to spend as needed. AI could start with no money, and be given a task or just “decide” to do a task. It generates a bitcoin/lightning wallet and either convinces its creator to give it funds or otherwise finds a way to earn funds online With access to money, it pays for things it needs.”

The potential is incredible and alarming. Regardless of our reservations it will happen, and it has happened. In a recent video Kody Low (Head of Developer and Product Support at Fedi) asks GPT-4 write code for him, and pays GPT-4 on a per-question basis using Lightning Network. The fact that GPT-4 can write code is not the novelty, it’s that an AI now has access to a payments system and can transfer store of value assets (i.e. money).

Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs when describing L402 as a “network is capable of doing micropayments that are much smaller than what Visa and Mastercard can do. With Lightning, you can send payments worth a fraction of a penny. This opens up new use-cases that aren’t possible with credit cards, for example, such as machine-to-machine payments, the streaming of micro-payments, or the usage of micro-payments as a spam-prevention technique”

All this makes me wonder about the long term impact on on crypto markets as the volume of transactions inevitable experiences hockey stick growth due to growing AI driven microtransactions.

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Gerggely Orosz of Pragmatic Engineer dove into Ayhan Fuat Çelik’s analysis of and speculated that coding assistants like Copilot, Cody, ChatGPT are partly to blame. He speculates that engineers are reaching for AI chatbots for code questions, and it’s hurting Stack Overflow’s traffic.

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Something I’m very excited about is the ability to run AI, LLM, etc. on local hardware. It addresses a couple of disadvantages to cloud based AI: security & privacy, lack of customization, and high cost of renting GPU cycles.

Stability AI just announced StableCode which is intended to do for code generation what Stable Diffusion did for image creation. Not only can you run it locally, but the model supports a longer context window (16,000 tokens) which allows for more detail instructions.

The present challenge is with hardware as AI requires a very beefy GPU and Nvidia has a lock on most of the market with its proprietary CUDA parallel computing programming model. It is possible to hack your way into running AI on AMD hardware, but it isn’t for the faint of heart.

I’ve been experimenting with Stable Diffusion locally w/ my AMD GPU (RX 580 8GB) for a bit. It’s not the fastest, but b/c I’m since not renting Google Colab I can leave it running long batches without a cost concern. If StableCode is similar it could address some of the privacy concerns about co-mingling code and data inside a public LLM.

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Everyone is talking about ChatGPT. If by everyone you mean software developers, students and want to be tech bros. It might seem like a door-to-door scam, but truthfully, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Or as Tech Unicorn declared: “Have you heard about our lord and savior Chat GPT?”

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I’m reminded, every time I pick up the phone or go to a restaurant, that we’re still experiencing widespread labor shortages. Not to sound like a broken record but Boomers retiring, not enough Gen Z to pick up the slack. Birth rates falling… blah, blah. The US is better off than many countries because of Millennials.

It could be gloom and doom, except we forget about the productivity gains of the past 30 years. Largely brought to us by the personal computer and later the Internet, these gains allowed companies to produce more with fewer humans. To be ungracious to the older generations, it allows us to not need to do everything by hand.

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Limiting yourself to a single provider ignores the power and flexibility of the cloud. While our journey may begin in on place, our travels will take us on a expedition across providers to find the best of breed services. And that’s OK.

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