Independence Day Drizzle

Prometheum

If you really want to nerd out over the legal implications of what it means to be a crypto exchange, you owe it to yourself to listen this recent episode of the Unchained podcast.

In it, Special Counsel from Paradigm (crypto investment firm home to ventures like Uniswap) Rodrigo Seira "debates" Aaron Kaplan (Co-CEO of Prometheum) on the current state of the law. I use the term "debate" pretty loosely here as it's basically an ever-escalating slew of accusations, aphorisms, and condescension from both sides. But super fun, champ!

Why is this conversation so interesting? Well, at this time, Prometheum is the only company to get official approval to be a digital-asset securities broker (as a Special Purpose Broker-Dealer) by the SEC and FINRA and recently was granted a license to be the first regulated crypto custodian by FINRA.

In the discussion, Rodrigo represents the standard crypto counterposition – that the laws as they stand can’t currently represent tokens as securities and that the asset class does not fit the definitions that were available to us nearly 100 years ago.

Once you understand this, you can see why this would be a heated debate. This is a war for the soul of crypto; the idea that it’s an investment vehicle is diametrically opposed to the idea that it is a currency with utility, writ large.

Matt Walsh (no, not that one – the one from Castle Island Ventures) raises a series of very interesting points and questions in his Twitter thread that I highly suggest you read for yourself. This adds a lot of color to conversation, so perhaps listen first.

This Week in AI

Twitter’s War Rages On

If you’ve been here a while, you already know my thoughts on the downstream impact of the war against LLMs.

This past week, Elon is back at it again by capping the number of tweets that users can…see with their eyes. This goes beyond simply punishing bots, legit developers, and LLM’s API farmers – to now punishing practically any highly-active user of the system.

As an unverified user, you will be limited to seeing 600 tweets a day (recently upped to 1k). So following Musk himself will kill most of your allocation with his based memes.

ChatGPT Features

OpenAI announced that it was disabling ChatGPT’s browsing feature due to its ability to bypass paywalls.

This decision has been hotly contested, with some claiming that OpenAI has been punishing paying ChatGPT+ users since inception. The value of ChatGPT+ is constantly under fire with other less expensive options emerging and OpenAI’s slowness to release new features paying customers.

With this came several other announcements, including GPT-4 API availability to all Plus subscribers as well as opening access to its Code Interpreter feature. If there was any concern about Browsing being misused, you can bet that a feature that allows code execution is going to be absolutely abused. I have to wonder if it will execute code that can make HTTP requests, because if so…

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is built on… 🥁 

Laravel. Yes, Laravel. Straight from the OpenAI careers page:

You know what, PHP gets a lot of unreasonable hate…and I completely support that.

🧵 Threads! A boring dystopia, the FBI’s playground, or something else?

Meta went live with its new Threads app this week to mixed reviews.

Currently sitting around 68 million users, it has a ways to go to catch up to Elon’s 450 million, but has absolutely caught the attention of people who make their money on Instagram.

I’ve used Threads a bit, just to get a feel, and I gotta say it has a really weird vibe. It’s the same feeling I felt in the early days of Twitter when “famous” people were getting their bearings on how to appropriately interact with fans. Some clearly never quite got the hang of it.

It’s also very weird to see people who “never got Twitter”, raving about how great Threads is after only a few hours live.

To add to that, seeing Zuck respond to every semi-well-known person on the new platform was absolutely cringeworthy.

There are other valid criticisms floating out there too, some that deserve genuine attention:

• All the red flags in the Threads privacy policy

• Threads vs. Twitter: 5 Ways Instagram’s New App Comes Up Short

• Threads is so depressing

Proponents of the new service seem to basically fall into one camp – anti-Elon Musk. Of course this is an oversimplification, but people see Elon as propping up right-wing agenda and enforcing selective-free speech since taking over Twitter. The truth is that Threads might not be just that, but it will be completely opening up whatever the US Government asks.

To stoke the flames a bit more, Twitter has sent a letter to Meta threatening legal action against the company, citing “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

Will Threads win out in the end? The court of law and court of opinion may be deliberating for a while longer.

Links and whatnot

• The tourist who defaced the nearly 2,000-year-old Colosseum in Rome says he wasn't aware of the monument's age…

• Why are there no startups in the construction sector?

• Octopuses sleep—and possibly dream—just like humans

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