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Erik Voorhees, a crypto OG, has launched Venice, a private, uncensorable, open-source competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, powered by a decentralized crypto network.

In the episode, Erik and Venice’s COO Teana Baker-Taylor delve into the problems with censorship and data in current AI agents, including how they create honeypots of information about users’ search history for hackers, or that they can be absurdly politically correct, such as refusing to create images of Caucasian people. As they point out, there’s also the risk that the companies managing them could be censoring the models to please the Chinese government, in order to access the market in that country. They talk about their plan for Venice to gain market share, considering that DuckDuckGo, a privacy-preserving competitor to Google, has a much smaller market share. And they explain why they intend for Venice to eventually use the compute of Morpheus, or other decentralized crypto-powered compute networks.

They also critique the SEC’s current regulatory approach to crypto, calling it “a joke.” Additionally, they explore the concept of AI agents using cryptocurrencies as their primary currency.

Show highlights:

  • Why Erik decided to move into artificial intelligence and merge it with crypto
  • What problems decentralized AI would solve and why it’s hard to solve sexist and racist views in LLMs
  • The differences between ChatGPT and other similar products and Venice AI
  • Why privacy is so important for users, according to Erik, and how Venice doesn’t store the users’ information
  • How central governments could manipulate information to their own benefit and how to avoid it
  • Whether people will shift from using search engines to LLMs
  • What Morpheus is and its goal to provide decentralized computation for AI
  • How Erik and Teana believe crypto and AI will continue to work together
  • Erik’s and Teana’s thoughts on some of the recent government actions against founders of crypto privacy services such as Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash
  • Why Erik believes that the SEC has become a joke

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Guests:

Links

Previous coverage on Unchained of crypto/AI:

 

Venice AI:

Architecture:

LLMs:

Recent cases on privacy: