Author: Yogi Nelson

Namaste Yogis. Welcome to the Blockchain & AI Forum, where your blockchain and artificial intelligence technology questions are answered, mostly correct! Here no question is too mundane. As a bonus, a proverb is also included. Today’s question, was submitted by Samsara, from Puerto Rico, and she wants to know: what is ChatGPT and how has it evolved?

Samsara, you came to the right place. ChatGPT means Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. No wonder it goes by ChatGPT instead! Ha Ha. Essentially, ChatGPT is a large language model-based chatbot and more. I’m confident you have encountered bots. Nevertheless, let’s define bot and chatbot.

A bot is an automated software application that performs repetitive tasks over a network and follows very specific instructions. Bots can perform only as programmed. There are various types of bots, including chatbots. A chatbot simulates human conversation using machine learning. A chatbot can respond to simple questions. Alexa from Amazon is a prime example. Now over to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI—an artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment company. OpenAI’s mission statement is, “to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.” Sounds, virtuous. Do you remember when Google’s motto was “don’t be evil”? Ha, ha. Just saying! Now it’s time to examine the evolution of ChatGPT.

Before ChatGPT, natural language models existed. However, those models were trained on large amounts of annotated data for a particular task. Consequently, those models were strictly limited to what they were trained for and incapable of nothing beyond. To overcome those limitations, OpenAI proposed a generative language model built on unlabeled data thus allowing users to refine the model. The intent was to get the model to perform classification, question answering, and sentiment analysis. Essentially, ChatGPT1 was “trained” to attempt appropriate responses to questions based on accessible data. Although ChatGPT1 was a major technological upgrade, it tended to generate repetitive and generic responses. Your mobile phone device has evolved and so has ChatGPT.

In ChatGPT2, the amount of training data increased by 10X. Therefore, GPT2 generated far more coherent human like answers. Moreover, the processing speed jumped. However, the development of unsupervised learning was the great leap forward. With unsupervised learning, the model could “learn” and make predictions based on the vast amounts of data it was fed without the need for explicit instructions from humans. Holy!

ChatGPT3 was trained on an ever-growing mountain of data. Via the internet, GPT 3 accesses books, articles, websites, social media, etc. and consequently, has learned to “understand” and analyze language patterns. Additionally, GPT3 can perform tasks it was never trained to do. However, it tends to offer repetitive answers, is subject to bias, and consumes lots of power. Critics say it’s just a large memory machine that can spit out answers but isn’t any more intelligent than a calculator. Ouch, rather harsh!

ChatGPT4 is a multi-modal model, meaning it can handle text and images. That’s a first. With greater access to data and more training, ChatGPT 4 is much more creative and collaborative. Unlike its older siblings, GPT3 can generate text that are eerily human like. For instance, it can mimic a writer’s writing style. (Hey, don’t copy me!) Ha, ha. ChatGPT scored in the top 10% in the exam given to become an attorney and it’s multi-lingual in 26 languages! However, OpenAI warns ChatGPT4 makes up “facts” and thus be careful!

Samsara, I hope I answered your questions. Always remember the proverb from Laos—No one is so rich as to throw away a friend.

Until next time.

Yogi Nelson

Namaste Yogis.   Welcome to the Blockchain & AI Forum, where your blockchain and artificial intelligence technology questions are answered, mostly correct!   Here no question is too mundane.  As a bonus, a proverb is also included.  Today’s question, submitted by Marcel from Florida, is:  did President Biden issue an executive order on artificial intelligence (AI)?

Marcel, you came to the right place.  Yes, President Biden did issue a lengthy executive order (EO) regarding AI.  I’ll hit the high points only.  The official name is the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. The EO says “… the policy is to advance and govern the development and use of AI in accordance with the following eight guiding principles and priorities.” 

1.         Artificial intelligence must be safe and secure.  Biden wants to develop labeling and content provenance mechanisms, so that Americans can determine when content is generated using AI.  Sounds analogous to food labels for AI?

 2.        Promote responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration.  Biden proposes to give small AI firms opportunities and limit the power of the big tech firms.  Well… call me skeptical, but campaign contributions often get in the way of good intentions.

3.         A commitment to workers. Biden offers to revise existing job training programs for AI and says AI should not undermine rights, worsen job quality, encourage undue worker surveillance, lessen market competition, introduce new health and safety risks, or cause harmful labor-force disruptions. 

4.         Artificial intelligence policies must advance equity and civil rights. Biden’s EO proposes to issue an AI Bill of Rights, however, offers no clue what it might say or when it would be proposed.  Nevertheless, a fascinating idea. (Will be tough to improve on James Madison’s work!)  I suggest owning your own data rather than it being monetized by mega-tech firms as the first right!

5.         Enforce existing consumer protection laws. Good! Discrimination should be illegal whether by a person or by a computer programmed by a person. 

6.         Protect Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.  As Edward Snowden demonstrated, I don’t believe this, but we can hope.

7.         Increase the Government’s ability to use AI in daily operations.  This reminds me of Vice President Gore’s “reinventing government” initiative.  With Gore at the command, government workers adopted wide-spread use of the web and the feds gave generous grants to encourage cities to do likewise.  Gore once famously said, “I invented the internet” and of course he did not. He simply ordered all government workers to use the internet! Ha ha.

8.         The US should lead the way to global societal, economic, and technological progress.  What else would you expect a US President to say.

The “O” in EO stands for order and to no one’s surprise Biden orders a series of actions across the sprawling federal bureaucracy.  A significant percentage are related to national security, but also includes ordering the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop guidelines with the aim of promoting consensus industry standards.  There are also countless orders related to finance, public health, establishing advisory committees, inter-agency working groups, partnerships with universities and private sector, expediting visas for skilled AI workers, regional innovation clusters for small business, and AI in law enforcement. Essentially, Biden ordered most government agencies to bust a move!

Pushing the federal bureaucracy forward is a Herculean task.  But as they say in Hungry, “it’s easy to push a cart being pulled by 12 oxen.”

Marcel, I hope I answered all your questions.  Until next time.

Yogi Nelsonhttps://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/

Namaste Yogis.   Welcome to the Blockchain & AI Forum, where your blockchain and artificial intelligence technology questions are answered, mostly correct!   Here no question is too mundane.  Doris from Puerto Rico asks if data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are identical terms with different names? 

Doris, you came to the right place.  Let’s take a stroll as we talk.  Without doubt, the birth of computing has resulted in a data explosion.  Since the creation of social media, the acceleration in data volume has grown 44 times, according to IDC, Azeem Azhar.  But data, like oil, is useless until it is “processed”.  In 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby famously said, “data is the new oil”.  What did Homby mean?  Humby meant raw data, like oil, isn’t useful but when it processed/refined it is essential.  In other words, data must be processed into information to unleash its potential.  Stop and consider social media.  Social media companies sell advertisement based on customer data.  As with oil, there is a constant battle over data ownership.  The processing of data into information is a new discipline, called data science. Essentially, data science is an umbrella term that encompasses data gathering, analytics, mining, and artificial intelligence, and machine learning.  Doris it’s now time to talk artificial intelligence.

Humans are extremely clever.  We invent solutions whether the “problem” is nature made or of our own doing.  With mountains of data and an avalanche of money at stake, we have developed a new tool, artificial intelligence, (AI) to deal with data overload problems. AI is essentially, teaching machines to learn from data and derive a variety of useful insights.  AI is commonly defined as a simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans. The key is the A in AI; it is artificial intelligence. AI includes a wide range of methods that enable computers to perform tasks that would ordinarily require a human.  Basically, AI enables computers to mimic human intelligence using logic. For example, with AI, problem solving is possible, as is language understanding, pattern recognition, and even decision-making, or at least recommended decisions.  With limited time, we need to move onto machine learning.

Machine Learning (ML) is the capability of artificial intelligence systems to learn by extracting patterns from data.  ML provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from the experience without being explicitly programmed.  The key is not explicitly programmed. ML develops computer programs that teach themselves to grow and change when exposed to new data.  ML uses the data in a dataset to detect patterns and adjust actions accordingly. And ML automates analytical model building using statistical and machine learning algorithms.  With ML, machines “learn” thereby leading to artificial intelligence.

Doris, thank you for the question.  Hopefully, I explained the differences well. 

Yogi Nelson

Namaste Yogis.   Welcome to the Blockchain & AI Forum, where your blockchain and artificial intelligence technology questions are answered, mostly correct!   Here no question is too mundane.  As a bonus, a proverb is also included.  Today’s question, submitted by Henry from Los Angeles, is:  are smart contracts truly smart and are they legitimately contracts?

Henry, you came to the right place.  Blockchain technology offers numerous innovations and among the most revolutionary are “smart contracts.” Let’s take a stroll and talk about it.

Henry, the obvious place to start is by defining the terms.  Smart contracts are digital agreements that execute automatically based on real-world data inputs. Let’s break down this sentence.  First, smart contracts are digital agreements.  The digital agreement aspect makes it a “contract” between two parties.  What makes it “smart” is they are programmed to execute automatically based on real-world inputs. But hold on, there is more to the story.

We start by disclosing a basic truth.  Smart contracts are simply computer programs. The word “contract” has no legal meaning in this context.  Sorry.  In Slovenia, there is an old proverb that says, “tell the truth and leave immediately”.  I’ll stick around to the end of this article. 

Second, once deployed the smart contract code cannot change. Smart contracts are immutable.  Unlike traditional software, the only way to modify a smart contract is to deploy a new instance.  This is one reason why smart contracts are not as brilliant as advertised, at least not yet. 

Third, smart contracts are deterministic.  By deterministic I mean they either happen in full, exactly as described, or they don’t run at all.  It is binary; all or nothing.  Life is seldom all or nothing but in the world of “smart contracts” it is. Smart contracts see white or black, nothing in between.  Consequently, smart contracts are less than genius, for now.

Four, smart contracts operate within a constricted execution context. They can access their own state, the context of the transaction that called them, and some information about the most recent blocks. Consequently, “smart contracts” require a helping hand from external reliable sources known as oracles.

Take this simple theoretical smart contract example that includes an oracle:

IF condition A exist (the Lakers win) THEN perform function B (send Yogi Nelson $1)

The “smart contract” would be programmed to transmit a $1 payment to Yogi Nelson if the Lakers win.  The oracle would transmit to the “smart contract” the game results and Yogi Nelson would receive $1 if the Lakers win. 

Get this Henry, processes that currently involve manual interactions between two parties can be automated and the value moved in real time over the blockchain rather than settling days later as with traditional banking.  That means speed, Henry!  Moreover, the fees of middleman and other intermediaries can be eliminated or certainly reduced. 

I have told the truth and now do as they say in Slovenia, “tell the truth and leave immediately”. 

Until next time.

Yogi Nelson

Today’s question, an excellent by the way, was submitted by John of San Diego.  John ask:  is Bitcoin the Original Digital Money?

Namaste Yogis!   Welcome to the Blockchain & AI Forum, where your blockchain and artificial intelligence technology questions are answered, mostly correct!   Here no question is too mundane.  As needed I answer your questions concerning important government regulations of blockchain, crypto, and AI. And, if that were not enough, as a bonus, occasionally a proverb or yoga fun fact is included at the conclusion of the article.  All this for the low, low, low price of free!

John, you came to the right place.  Sorry you Bitcoin maxis, Bitcoin is not the first digital money. Bitcoin is not the “OG” of digital money as they might say in the blockchain ‘hood’. In fact, Bitcoin wasn’t even the second, third, or fourth digital money.  John, come with me and I’ll give you the rundown.

In the beginning (oh wait, that opening has been taken).  Let’s start again. First, there was DigiCash.  DigiCash was founded by David Chaum in 1989, a full 20 years before Bitcoin.  DigiCash money was known as cyberbucks.  (I like the name!) A hand full of banks tried Digicash, including Deutsche Bank (the largest German bank) but Digicash crashed.  Perhaps Chaum was too far ahead of his time.  Onto attempt number two.

E-Gold came into existence in 1996.  E-Gold was backed by real units of precious metal.  With E-Gold users could conduct instant transfers over the internet.  Everything in E-Gold was denominated in gold, like the dollar was before President Nixon delinked the dollar from the gold standard in 1971.  Why did he do that? Because the US didn’t have sufficient gold to back the dollar but thats a different story. E-Gold’s introduced micro-payments as its chief innovation.  Unfortunately, underground types were using the system and the government shut down E-Gold in 2008. Ugh.

HashCash. We can thank Adam Back for creating HashCash in 1997.  Mr. Back introduced the proof-of-work idea to HashCash.  Bitcoin is based on proof-of-work.  Back also proposed adding a fee or “postage” to emails to reduce spam.  Terrific idea. Why it didn’t catch on is for a future post.

B-Money.  In 1998 Wei Dai introduced B-Money.  The consensus protocol was proof-of-work.  Mr. Dai linked the creation of money with the computing power used to create it.  B-Money push us forward by creating the notion of broadcasting transactions on the network to resolve disputes.  On to Bit Gold.

Bit Gold.  In 2005 Mr. Nick Szabo moved us closer to Bitcoin with the creation of Bit Gold.  Mr. Szabo’s idea was to bring the scarcity of precious metals into the digital realm.  Now that’s interesting. Szabo’s thesis was as follows:  gold is difficult to mine and even more difficult to counterfeit; hence, why not take the value of gold and make it digital?  Szabo did not follow-up and Bit Gold slowly died. Nick, why did you stop?

On Halloween, 2008 an anonymous person(s) name Satoshi Nakamoto published a whitepaper titled, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” and on that day Bitcoin was born!  No one knows Satoshi’s identify.  We don’t know if Satoshi was one person or many.  We don’t know if Satoshi is male or female.  Satoshi clearly had supreme computer programming skills. Nakamoto also had strong opinions regarding economics and finance.  Satoshi’s identify remains a mystery.  Let’s not stir the pot by guessing the identity.  As they say in Bolivia, “A quarrel is like buttermilk, the more you stir it, the sourer it grows.”

Until next time.

Yogi Nelson