To investors,
OpenAI announced GPT-4o yesterday. The demos were incredible, including real-time language translation, a clean verbal interface where users can speak to the model, the model’s use of photo and video inputs, and the ability for AI bots to speak with each other to accomplish tasks.
The most impressive part to me was the voice interface.
If humans are able to transition from typing on their computer to simply speaking to the machine, it will have profound implications to productivity. Given that the model can now process voice instructions with a high degree of accuracy, the bots are able to talk with one another.
For example, watch this demo of two bots talking to each other in a customer service scenario. Companies are going to save enormous amounts of money. Customers are going to save even more time and headache in the future.
So the bots can now talk to each other. The use cases people invent in the coming years is going to be incredible to watch.
But there is one area of artificial intelligence that most people seem to have a blind spot — how will the bots interact with money?
Let me explain.
These AI bots are now reaching a point where you can instruct them to do things on your behalf. You can tell them to talk to a customer service representative at a company you purchased something from. You can tell them to call a store and get information on a product or service. You could ask the bot to make a reservation for you.
You can even tell the bot to go shopping for you.
In many of these scenarios, the bot may have to make a purchase on your behalf. Let’s say that you ask the bot to find an item on the internet and purchase it for you. If the bot locates the desired item on Amazon, it can simply use your stored credit card information to complete the purchase. Painless and fast. There is a reason that Bezos and team invented the one-click check out.
But what if the bot finds the item located at a different online store?
There is still a chance that the bot can utilize your credit card information, either because you explicitly gave the bot the information to save or perhaps the bot has access to your Apple Pay or equivalent digital wallet.
Again, not a big deal for a bot to purchase a product or service from a retailer that is set-up to process payments.
That is not inclusive of all potential money transactions though. How will these bots handle paying each other when appropriate?
This is where things get really interesting in my opinion. When bots are acting on behalf of humans or corporations, they can leverage the same financial infrastructure that the human or company owns. But when a bot is acting on behalf of itself, there is no bank account or payment processing infrastructure available in the legacy financial world.
I believe this is where stablecoins and digital wallets will come into play. You can easily spin up a digital wallet without having to hand over any personal information. As long as you have the seed phrase, you own the wallet and have access forever. If a bot wants to send or receive money with another bot, then using these digital wallets will empower them to do so.
They don’t need the traditional bank account.
Given that the digital wallet will now serve as the financial infrastructure, this means that the bots will use digital currency for the actual payments as well. You may think that bitcoin will be their currency of choice. It is the largest market cap cryptocurrency and has the best brand awareness.
It also has a degree of volatility to it as well.
So I don’t think bitcoin will be the bot’s choice currency. Instead, the bots are more likely to use stablecoins. The stablecoins are…”stable.” That stability comes from the fact that products and services are priced in the underlying currency. When a bot requests a specific amount of money, they will likely do it in dollars. Hence, the appearance of stability becomes obvious.
So one way the bots could change their preference to bitcoin rather than stablecoins is to have products, services, and bot money requests denominated in bitcoin. Maybe that will happen. But it doesn’t happen nearly as frequently as dollar denomination today.
Bitcoin is a great store of value. Dollars are great for medium of exchange. I don’t see either of those two facts changing any time soon. The bots are not inventing a new use case, but rather trying to emulate what humans already do.
There will be a ton of open questions, including how taxes will apply to bots, what occurs in legal disagreements between bots or bot owners, and many more we haven’t even thought of.
Too many market participants believe that artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies are separate industries. They are actually two technologies that fall under the automated future that we are headed towards. Make sure you are paying attention to all of this. It will impact your life, your business, and your investment portfolio.
Congratulations to the team at OpenAI. Yesterday’s demos were very impressive. I can’t wait to see what developers and entrepreneurs do with this new technology.
Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.
-Anthony Pompliano
Anthony Pompliano went on Julian Dorey's Podcast to talk playing football in college, being deployed in the middle of the season to Iraq, America today, making Facebook millions of dollars, discovering bitcoin, bitcoin adoption, and a theory between the Mafia and the fall of America.
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Anthony Pompliano on Julian Dorey’s Podcast discussing Bitcoin & Iraq Deployment
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