How AI Can Impact Web 3.0
What is artificial intelligence and its importance to the future of Web 3.0
Hey everyone! I hope y’all had a great Halloweekend. New Orleans is known as a spooky place with its history of Voodoo magic from urban legends like Marie Laveau and countless ghost tours available for tourists to waste money on. Thus, Halloweekend is always a fun time down south full of lots of drinking on Bourbon & Frenchmen St. as well as more family fun traditions like the punny skeleton house on St. Charles Avenue.
Now…on to the actual blog. Besides Web 3.0, one industry that has increasingly caught my attention over the last few months is AI. The most recent “Oh shit” moments I’ve had in a while playing with new technology and being in complete awe was using DALLE 2.0, which creates realistic images and art from text descriptions. If you want to see how crazy this application is, check out a few examples from a few friends and me playing around with it:
Just to clarify how crazy this technology is, think of it like this: none of these images existed before the AI created them. This is not an advanced search bot, it turns text into images. Aside from all the other incredible things it can do (which I will touch on in a little), AI will be incredibly impactful to Web 3.0. Although we are just scratching the surface of the Web 3.0 x AI duo that has the chance to rival the likes of Bonnie & Clyde, I wanted to show y’all what it looks like today and where it may go in the future. Let’s dive in!
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence has been around for centuries, with its earliest traces dating back to the Ancient Greeks (kinda a stretch, but I’ll take it). However, it wasn’t until the 1950s that AI began to take off, thanks to the work of Alan Turing and his Turing test, which is designed to determine whether a computer can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. In recent years, however, AI has become one of the hottest topics in the tech world, with companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft investing billions of dollars into research and development. So what exactly is AI, and why is it so important?
Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that deals with creating intelligent machine agents. These agents are capable of autonomously carrying out tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as understanding natural language and recognizing objects. In simpler terms, AI is the process of creating computers that can think and learn for themselves. This can be accomplished through a variety of methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.
One of the most crucial aspects of AI is its ability to improve over time. Unlike humans, who have a finite capacity for learning, computers can continue to get smarter as they are exposed to more data. This makes AI a powerful tool for businesses and organizations that can use it to make better decisions, automate tasks, and improve efficiency.
From retail to healthcare, AI is already starting to have a profound impact on several industries. In the retail sector, for instance, AI is being used to personalize shopping experiences, create virtual assistants, and automate customer service. In healthcare, AI is being used to diagnose diseases, develop new treatments, and improve patient care. And this is just the beginning. AI will only become more ubiquitous and influential across all industries as it continues to evolve. Ultimately, AI has the potential to revolutionize all aspects of our lives, some of which we can’t even comprehend yet.
One area of AI that I am still trying to wrap my head around is Generative AI. Generative AI is a type of AI that focuses on creating new data, as opposed to simply analyzing existing data. Generative AI systems are often used for tasks such as creating new images or text (think of the DALLE 2.0 pictures shared above). More applications are popping up every single day. Here are a few other examples to blow your mind:
Descript: All-in-one video and audio editing, as easy as a doc.
Copy.ai: Enhance writing content for your business
Hugging Face: Not a product itself, but Hugging Face is the largest AI community that has plenty of models to test for yourself. One of my favorites generates music from an image (try it for yourself).
With all these different generative AIs, you can create crazy content feedback loops similar to when as kids you would input a line of text into 20 different languages in Google Translate and see what it turned into.
If you read these examples and thought to yourself, “This all seems cool, but it doesn’t do anything super groundbreaking,” then allow me to introduce you to AlphaFold. It is an AI system developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence and it regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiments. For us much dumber, non-tech/non-science folks, all you need to know is that it basically found the exact structure of every known protein. This will allow scientists to spend less time doing laborious and slow processes of analyzing the structures and more time making real-world impacts. CEO of ROME Therapeutics (never heard of this company before this blog) said, “AlphaFold speed and accuracy is accelerating the drug discovery process, and we’re only at the beginning of realizing its impact on getting novel medicines to patients faster.” Some pretty amazing stuff if you ask me.
So why is AI so important for the future of Web 3.0?
Web 3.0 is the next evolution of the internet, one that is centered around user-generated content, interoperability, and decentralized data. This new internet will be powered by blockchain technology and will be more secure, transparent, and user-friendly than the current web. To make this new internet a reality, however, we will need to find new ways to store and manage data. And this is where AI comes in.
AI will be essential for developing the applications and services that will run on the new decentralized internet. These applications will need to be able to handle a large amount of data, and AI will be the perfect tool for managing this data. AI algorithms can help to identify patterns and trends in data, which will be invaluable for developing effective and efficient services. Additionally, AI will also be important for developing the user interface and user experience for these applications. User interfaces powered by AI can provide a more personalized and engaging experience, which is crucial for ensuring the adoption of new technologies. Ultimately, AI will play a pivotal role in the development of the Web 3.0 industry.
I read a great piece by Jesus Rodriguez on CoinDesk where he describes the three main layers of the Web 3.0 stack where AI can emerge in significant ways (solid read). I don’t want to copy all his fantastic work, as clearly no one has ever succeeded in stealing other people’s ideas (jk lol). To summarize, AI will be able to make blockchains, protocols, and dapps run more efficiently by incorporating AI directly into their structures. Rodriguez believes that we will most likely see a top-down approach to AI integration in the Web 3.0 stack, and I made an incredibly detailed graphic to explain.
AI will be crucial for the future of the web 3.0 industry because it is the perfect tool for managing, analyzing, and making sense of data. AI will also be important for developing the applications and services that will run on the new decentralized internet.
Conclusion
If you got this far…thanks for reading! However, I can’t end this blog without telling you that I am a complete fraud of a writer. That is because about 50% of this blog was written by AI (mostly the parts that sound well-written and professional, lol). I used two AI products that were completely free: LEX & Moonbeam. Although they were not 100% perfect in taking my general idea and churning out a complete, detailed blog, they helped me steer my writing in the right direction and get out of the writer’s block that plagues many unemployed writers like myself. You can start using Moonbeam today, but LEX is invite-only at the moment. If you are interested in using LEX, you can use one of the five invites I have to offer.
If you are looking to learn more about AI, subscribe to the Ben’s Bites newsletter (has all the latest news you need to keep up with and blow your mind). I’ve got about three blog ideas ready to write, so I should be well-equipped until December. However, if there are any other topics (Web 3.0 or not) you’d like me to write about, please let me know. I’m still waiting for the first person to provide an idea, and if do, I will 100% write about it. See ya next week!
Here are my links if you feel inclined: