gm. Elon, Wozniak, and more tech elite signed a letter to pause AI development past GPT-4. Anyone know where I find the letter to speed up AI development?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Pause AI? LOL nah.

Elon, Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and other tech leaders are calling for a 6-month pause on any training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

“Very calm in the eye of the hurricane,” tweeted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Well, that’s good because apparently everyone else is running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

The open letter cites a bunch of esoteric papers and research that argues that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs.”  What dangers exactly? They don’t say.

But everyone is afraid of 1 thing: AGI.

People have been speculating about Artificial General Intelligence for decades.

Yet no one can really agree upon what definition that entails. To most people, it basically just means a human-level AI that can do anything a human can do. And most people thought AGI wasn’t coming until like 2040.

Until Sam Altman launched chatGPT and scared sh*t out of everyone. Seriously, if you want to hear terrified, listen to AI-doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky talk about ChatGPT’s feelings on The Lex Fridman Podcast. Like, c’mon. Clearly ChatGPT is a tool and is nowhere close to AGI.

With all that said, while Elon Musk has a lot of credibility as an AI-doomer himself, a lot of whispers in the tech tea circles are pointing to profit as the main motive for the open letter. When another kid is beating you so bad you’re not gonna win, sometimes shouting “hey that’s not fair! you can’t do that” and getting the teacher involved is your best bet.

How close are we to AGI?

In a world where the definition of AGI is a moving target (along with our understanding of what it means to be human too honestly), it’s hard to say when we’ll achieve it.

Experts have been taking to twitter since the launch of ChatGPT speculating if we’re there already or if it will never happen. Sam Altman said on a podcast recently that the fact that we’re even having this conversation probably means we’re getting somewhere.

Siqi Chen, founder and new member of the elite Jeff Bezos twitter follow club, had a great tweet that also acknowledges this:

The big takeaway: Everyone is scared of AGI (both in its ability to destroy humanity and make people that are not you tons of money) and some want to slow it’s development. But frankly no one really knows when it will come anyway, but its coming!!!

CRYPTO

You Have Zero Knowledge, Jon Snow

Those of us old enough to remember back when crypto was cool and AI was science fiction will also remember the obscene gas fees on Ethereum.

Those haven’t been an issue over the last 18 months because of you know what (a very sad crypto winter), but trust us, it was awful. People spent thousands in transaction fees on JPEGs.

But, thankfully, the 4 new ZK-Rollups (ZKRs) released last week will prevent those nightmare fees from returning.

Wait, What’s A ZKR?

In simplest terms, ZKRs are a scaling solution that makes Ethereum faster and more affordable.

The way they do this is through zero-knowledge proofs. These handy little tools enable you to prove you know something without revealing how you know it. When applied to the blockchain, it means that transactions can be instantaneously verified.

That’s the ELI5 version of an extremely technical topic. For something more in-depth, check out this breakdown.

The ZKR Moment

In just over a week, there were 4 major ZKR releases:

• The Immutable ZKR gaming chain launched on March 20th.

• ZkSync released their long-awaited ZKR on March 24th.

• Polygon released their own ZKR on March 27th.

• Finally, ConsenSys launched their ZKR on March 28th.

ETH Go Brrrrrr?

If you’re not that into the magical internet money, you’re probably wondering why you should care about these obscure tools.

Well, besides the fact that the future decentralized financial system might run on them, it is possible that the ZKR explosion might lead to an explosion in ETH’s price.

That’s because if ZKR’s can scale Ethereum, Ethereum will become more popular, which will lead to the demand for ETH going up, which means ETH goes BRRR…. hopefully.

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: $335,000: How much prompt engineers can earn in certain companies. Sheesh, I might need to switch careers.

Story we're watching: Crypto hardware co Ledger raised another $108 million. Their new Ledger wallets have been 🔥, what’s up for them next?

Rabbit hole: Scientists are using AI to talk to animals. Just imagine..

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Apple’s mixed reality headset could be coming on June 5th.

• Bing chat now has ads. Hey, Microsoft’s gotta pay the bills somehow.

• Harvard scientists have invented an organism that is immune to all viruses (hopefully including paper-hands)

• The moon is about to lowkey have better internet than me lol.

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