AI, Crypto & Web3: The Future of Intelligent Agent w/ @LexSokolin 00:07 - Who is Lex Sokolin 03:39 - The Economics of AI 05:16 - Why Crypto Struggles 07:51 - Web2 vs. Web3 AI 10:46 - DAOs in AI Frameworks 19:57 - The Rise of On-Chain AI Agents 30:35 - The Future of AI & Crypto

There’s a new phenomenon of small groups of people who are running these small little quant funds driven by AI models who are making fuck-you returns. I’ve personally seen many who are 2x’ing capital in months. Many unsubstantiated rumors also claim SSI is a quant shop too. Well known quant funds have all tested out LLMs for trading. Some claim it doesn’t work. Others, well.. what do we think Jane Street doing with their huge GPU cluster? On top of that, there’s a ton of people asking Claude / GPT what stocks to buy and/or “vibe code me a trading engine”. Applies to other financial instruments too: derivatives, futures, crypto, and on the less sophisticated side, prediction masks. It begs the question: how does this change how we think about markets? how much retail volume is driven purely by the ripple effects of AI models? does this completely destroy efficient market hypotheses in favor of “correlated model hypothesis.” Early theories say – Small studies including one by the Fed show destabilizing effects. – We see amplified concentrated trades into the 20 known names in the market. – Can leave trading vulnerable to GEO attacks like publishing specific articles to “poison” the models decision making. Eventually any alpha generated by the model at a point of time *should* decay over time. New anti-AI trading strategies with custom post trains too. Remember, you need be able to afford the tokens to participate in this alpha. What does this mean for the future of wealth accumulation? We live in a brave new world.

1/6 @Mastercard just launched Agent Pay for Machines. New infrastructure built for AI agents to transact with each other, autonomously, at machine speed. @Nevermined_ai is part of it 🧵

This is a critical post to read if you’re building an applied AI company right now. “An application earns its place in the untrainable corner by doing unglamorous work: arranging a company's private reality so a model can act on it, handing the model the tools to act, working with the customer to change the reality of its workforce. A company that brings the translation is tough to copy – and the translation never ends. Integration and maintenance run as long as the relationship does, won by teams that put domain-specialized engineers and tools next to the customer.” There’s still an insanely large gulf between model capabilities and what it takes to apply them to specific corporate workflows. Some of that is technology that needs to be built, a lot is access to (and formatting of) the right data to work with, and a ton more is on the change management and specific implementation work (FDEs, etc.) it takes to make AI work in any specific corporate setting. 2 things can be very true at once: frontier models and labs will continue to grow an incredible amount, and there will be a vast ecosystem of software and services companies that emerge to bring the power of these models to real enterprises. This makes room for new infrastructure provides, applied AI companies in every vertical, new versions of system integrators, and more players. Incredibly exciting time on all fronts.

At NIV, we've been seeing tremendous growth clustering around the intersection of AI, Stablecoins, DeFi, and Fintech. This has led us to believe that agentic finance, defined broadly, will be one of the biggest trends of the next decade. Indeed, we believe that 1) AI agents are on the cusp of becoming true economic actors, able to discover, negotiate, and transact, 2) there will be billions of such agents within 5-10 years, engaging in trillions of dollars in annual transactions, 3) these agents will need new financial systems, markets, infrastructure, and tools, which will unlock applications and experiences that are hard to imagine today, and create tremendous value. This is one of our main areas of focus, so if you're working in this space, please get in touch. Full Deck Here: lnkd.in/emSGsGDK

This is a pretty striking shift toward Chinese models by American AI startups since the start of the year. substack.com/@profgmarkets/p…