GPT-3 and Crypto Assets

Just recently been talking digital Assets and how advances in crypto might influence them.  Here a piece from Coindesk that talks some of the issues, considering it.   I am thinking this, let me know if you have comments. Full opinion piece at the link.

Crypto Needn’t Fear GPT-3. It Should Embrace It
Jul 22, 2020 at 17:47 UTC   By Jesus Rodriquez  in Coindesk

Jesus Rodriguez is the CEO of IntoTheBlock, a market intelligence platform for crypto assets. He has held leadership roles at major technology companies and hedge funds. He is an active investor, speaker, author and guest lecturer at Columbia University. 

During the last few days, there has been an explosion of commentary in the crypto community about OpenAI’s new GPT-3 language generator model. Some of the comments express useful curiosity about GPT-3, while others are a bit to the extreme, asserting that the crypto community should be terrified about it. 

The interest is somewhat surprising because the GPT models are not exactly new and they have been making headlines in the machine learning community for over a year now. The research behind the first GPT model was published in June 2018, followed by GPT-2 in February 2019 and most recently GPT-3 two months ago. 

See also: What Is GPT-3 and Should We Be Terrified?

I think it is unlikely that GPT-3 by itself can have a major impact in the crypto ecosystem. However, the techniques behind GPT-3 represent the biggest advancement in deep learning in the last few years and, consequently, can become incredibly relevant to the analysis of crypto-assets. In this article, I would like to take a few minutes to dive into some of the concepts behind GPT-3 and contextualize it to the crypto world.  .... 

Assembling, Using, Visual Knowledge

We also looked at ways to assemble visual information, for use in training, communication, archiving, data.    And at patterns in that data that wold make it more useful.   One thing that came up was how to augment it to make it most useful to the largest group.  A recognition of it as an asset.  And the need for related metadata.

NBA Teams Enhancing Fan Experience with High-Tech Replays
ABC News
Charles Odum
November 15, 2019

Six National Basketball Association (NBA) teams are implementing 360-degree video replays in their arenas to augment the fan experience. The technology allows fans to review shots and gameplay by changing the angle, similar to video-game players' use of all-angle replays. The teams partnered with technology provider Intel to install 38 5K video cameras in their arenas, which work in concert to bring the replays to in-game video boards, TV broadcasts, and fans' devices via social media. The replays not only enhance the fan experience, but also can help coaches and scouts refine player assessments. Joe Abercrombie with the NBA's Atlanta Hawks called the technology “the wave of the future,” adding that it is “one more thing to give people a reason to come” to watch games at the arenas.

See:  Northeastern University Institute for Experiential AI  ...  

DAML: Contract Language of Distributed Ledgers

Quite an interesting piece on contract languages and 'Smart Contracts".  A recent proposal made me look deeper into this idea, especially as it might connect to supply chain and procurement efficiencies.  Considerable 7-page piece, admittedly technical here, but worth taking a close look.  And of  course this gets to workflow, always a particular angle of interest of mine.  Below just a few excerpts.

Case Study
DAML: The Contract Language of Distributed Ledgers
A discussion between Shaul Kfir and Camille Fournier

When Shaul Kfir cofounded Digital Asset in 2014, he was out to prove something to the financial services industry. He saw it as being not only hamstrung by an inefficient system for transaction reconciliation, but also in danger of missing out on what blockchain technology could do to address its shortcomings.

Since then, Digital Asset has gone to market with its own distributed-ledger technology, DAML (Digital Asset Modeling Language). And that does indeed take advantage of blockchain—only not in quite the way Kfir had initially intended. He and Digital Asset ended up taking an engineering "journey" to get to where they are today.

Kfir readily admits his own background in cryptography and cryptocurrency—both as a researcher (at Technion and MIT) and as a cryptocurrency entrepreneur in Israel—had more than just a little to do with the course that was originally charted. As for lessons learned along the way, Camille Fournier, the head of platform development for a leading New York City hedge fund, helps to elicit those here. She brings to the exercise her own background in distributed-systems consensus (as one of the original committers to the Apache Zookeeper Project) and financial services (as a former VP of technology at Goldman Sachs).  ....  "

" .... To clarify, think about how large technology companies use their infrastructure to achieve greater agility. Most of them today have some logically centralized infrastructure that includes a central code repository and a CI/CD [continuous integration/continuous delivery] system. If these ideas can be expanded to an industry level in the sense that you can start rolling out workflows as smart contracts that are written only once and then made available for everyone to build upon, that's clearly more efficient than leaving it to each organization to write its own workflows. ... "