Erik Voorhees' latest venture, Venice, is a private, uncensorable, open-source AI agent run on decentralized computation.

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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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Guests:

Erik Voorhees, Founder and CEO of Venice AI

Previous appearances on Unchained:

Teana Baker-Taylor, COO at Venice AI

Links |

Previous coverage on Unchained crypto/AI:

Venice AI:

Erik’s thread announcing Venice
The Separation of Mind and State

Architecture:

About Morpheus.Network
Messari: What is Akash Network?

LLMs:

MIT Technology Review: LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention
China Talk: Censorship’s Impact on China’s Chatbots - by Nicholas Welch

Recent cases on privacy:

CoinDesk: Samourai Wallet Founders Arrested and Charged With Money Laundering
Cointelegraph: DOJ’s Tornado Cash arguments show ‘obvious disdain for privacy’ — Lawyer
CNBC: North Korea crypto hacking activity soars to record high in 2023, new report shows
Reuters: Exclusive: UN experts investigate 58 cyberattacks worth $3 bln by North Korea
Erik’s post on the right to have privacy

Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.

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