Technology finds its own uses

How will history remember the internet?

Probably not the way we do. It’s already difficult to recall how world-changing the advent of the World Wide Web seemed at the time. The screech of a dial-up modem felt like a technology arriving from outer space.

How much did it really change our lives, though? MapQuest replaced maps, Priceline replaced travel agents, and Craigslist replaced classifieds, sure. 

But these are differences of form more than substance — nothing like the life-altering advances of light bulbs replacing candles, refrigerators replacing ice boxes, cars replacing horses, or airplanes replacing steamships. 

eCommerce changed how we shop, but it’s still just shopping. Blogs changed what we read, but it’s still just reading.

The second generation of the internet — social media — was more novel and perhaps more transformative, though not in a way that many would celebrate. It’s no longer especially social, either. Social media is now just another form of media, our feeds filled with content made by people we don’t know and don’t interact with. 

It’s unlikely that will warrant much attention from historians looking back on the world of today. Instead, the history of the early 21st century seems certain to be the history of artificial intelligence — and the chapter on the internet will be about the data we created to train it.

Consider that Reddit makes about $150 million a year selling our posts to AI labs.

That’s only a fraction of what it makes from advertising, true. But which will historians find more worthy of study? The money Reddit makes putting ads for DraftKings in between posts on the subreddit r/LiveStreamFails? Or the money it makes from selling those posts as training data for LLMs?

Stack Overflow tells the same story. The question and answer site for programmers makes more money now — with no one asking any questions — than it did pre-ChatGPT when people were asking hundreds of thousands of them.

The site, launched as a way for humans to teach humans how to code, has had its biggest impact teaching AIs how to code instead.

Even Wikipedia — which makes money selling its publicly available data to AI labs — will likely be remembered more for educating language models than for educating humans.

If artificial intelligence defines this century, history may remember us less for building the internet than for filling it with words.

Built by Bitcoin

If the purpose of the internet turns out to be training AI, the purpose of Bitcoin may turn out to be accelerating it.

Most visibly, Bitcoin has donated much of its most valuable infrastructure to the cause. Today, for example, Bitdeer announced a deal to provide Anthropic with 121 megawatts of computing power from a data center previously used for bitcoin mining.

Dozens of others have done the same. AI has been moving into emptied bitcoin mining data centers like a growing hermit crab moves into an abandoned shell.

Measured as a percentage of AI’s total data center capacity, the contribution has been small.

Measured by time, however, it looks substantial. A data center can be repurposed from mining bitcoin to training AIs in about a year. To build one from scratch, it might take that long just to get planning permission.

It’s not just the infrastructure, though. Bitcoin has also contributed an unmeasurable amount of know-how to the effort.

When hyperscalers suddenly needed gigawatts of power to train and run LLMs, they inherited an industry of utilities, engineers, and developers that already knew how to make it happen.

In addition to the miners that brought their talents to AI, Haseeb Qureshi notes that “the biggest neoclouds are almost all ex-crypto talent.”

His conclusion that “without crypto, the current AI boom would not have been possible,” is almost certainly an overstatement. AI was an inevitability nearly a century in the making.

But crypto miners are part of the story of why it’s happening now — which might be what they’re ultimately remembered for.

Purpose TBD

The original purpose of blockchains is fading from memory.

Decentralization increasingly feels like an ancestor to honor rather than a principle to follow. Self-custody is a minefield that even crypto natives no longer recommend. The banks that crypto set out to replace may now be the most enthusiastic developers of blockchains.

These chains could well do something important, like tokenizing all the world’s assets. But the tokens will be KYC’d and you’ll need permission to launch a new one.

Interesting to financiers, perhaps. Less so to historians.

For blockchains to be remembered as more than yet another investing mania, they’ll have to enable something original — like Bob Gelfond’s proposal for funding AI capex with compute-backed money.

Gelfond mentions in passing that this new form of money “could be held anonymously on a blockchain,” and that’s clearly where it belongs.

He notes that full disclosure of outstanding issuance will be important and that issuers will likely offer a "staking yield" to maintain their purchasing power — two things that are best done on blockchains. 

The chains will be permissioned, of course. And KYC’d. And centralized.

But the technology will come from permissionless, anonymous, decentralized crypto.

The inspiration will, too. Gelfond credits bitcoin with “making people think seriously about alternative forms of money.”

If the next great form of money really is backed by compute, that might well be what blockchains are ultimately remembered for: the technology that financed AI.

Or something else, maybe.

But probably not for what they were intended.

— Byron Gilliam