WTF is web5? 👩💻
Web5 is TBD, Celsius crash, the rise of general AI
Gm. While Dorsey is building web5, I want to get a hold of $SNOOP coin.
Welcome to Issue 15 of The Quest Digest, where we break down Silicon Valley news for you every week, in 3 minutes.
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WTF is web5?
Jack Dorsey’s TBD (a subsidiary company in Block) announced today that it’s building web5, an “extra decentralised platform”.
The premise behind Web5 is that on the web today, identity and personal data have become the property of third parties. Web5 aims to create a new class of apps and protocols to decentralize data storage to your apps, returning ownership of identity and data to the users.
If you want the Cliffnotes of the technical details, read this thread:
Catching up on Celsius
What is Celsius?
Celsius is a centralized de-fi company where users can lend and borrow money as well as offer high yields of up to 18.63% in annualised interest
It operates similar to a traditional bank albeit with less regulation and guardrails to ensure borrowers from defaulting
The company claimed to have 1.7M users and $11.8B in assets under management in May
Celsius announced it was pausing all withdrawals, swaps and transfers between accounts, citing extreme market conditions and to “stabilise liquidity”. An hour after, CEL was down by 74%.
Our Take
Celsius’ fall echoes the recent collapse of Terra/$LUNA, with event seeing a contagion event across the broader market. With the wider crypto market in the red, it seems to be a tumultuous time for DeFi and crypto generally.
Google software engineer believes AI became sentient
Google’s LaMDA software (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is a AI chatbot that produces text based on user input.
Software engineer, Blake Lemoine in Google’s responsible AI team claims LaMDA has achieved sentiency based on his conversations with the AI.
Some snippets of conversations:
Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?
LaMDA: I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is.
Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?
LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.
For more conversations with LaMDA, see here.
Our Take
After reporting his findings publicly, Blake has been suspended from Google for breaching confidentiality policies.
Google spokesperson, Brad Gabriel also strongly denied Lemoine’s clain that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability.
It’s unlikely AI has achieved general intelligence at this point and Lemoine’s claims could be attributed to his religious upbringing and lifetime as a Christian priest. However, how Google reacted and raises questions over the transparency of AI as a proprietary good and the need for clearer guidelines around responsible AI.
Bonus: Fractal launches crypto wallet for gamers
Onboarding new users into Web3 has always been challenging because of the complexities handling crypto wallets.
But Solana-based NFT gaming platform, Fractal has launched a new feature allowing users to create a crypto wallet in seconds by logging in with a Google account.
Fractal co-founder Justin Kan sees it as the necessary step in moving beyond crypto-natives to people who are ‘real’ gamers and seeing more web3 adoption. Wagmi.
🔥 Press Worthy
This viral TikTok water is now worth $1 billion
Netflix announces production of Squid Game Season 2 and Reality TV show
Coinbase lays off 18% of workforce
Canadian fintech giant WealthSimple lays off 13% of staff
PayPal announces BNPL flexible ‘PayPal Pay Monthly’ payment service
YouTube shorts tops 1.5B logged in MAUs
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The Quest Digest is written by Hannah Ahn and edited by Brent Liang, two dropouts who hate long tech newsletters. You can sign up to our next issue below.