Introduction

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

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

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:

• Erik Voorhees and Cobie on Why FTX Loaned Out Customers’ Assets
• Why ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees Thinks Toxic Bitcoin Maximalism Is Bullshit
• ShapeShift’s Erik Voorhees on How Crypto Will Separate Money and State

Teana Baker-Taylor, COO at Venice AI

Links |

Previous coverage on Unchained crypto/AI:

• When AI and Blockchain Meet, How Can Each Technology Benefit?
• The Chopping Block: Why AI Will Change the Course of History in Crypto
• 5 Use Cases of AI in Blockchain
• A Beginner's Guide to AI Tokens

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

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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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