This AI chatbot is either an exploiter’s dream or their nightmare

December 2, 2022 Coin Telegraph

The crypto community has come across an AI-powered chatbot that can be used to audit smart contracts and expose vulnerabilities.

The online crypto community has discovered a new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot that can either be used to warn developers of smart contracts vulnerabilities or teach hackers how to exploit them.

ChatGPT, a chatbot tool built by AI research company OpenAI, was released on Nov. 30 and was designed to interact “in a conversational way” with the ability to answer follow-up questions and even admit mistakes, according to the company.

However, some Twitter users have come to realize that the bot could potentially be used for both good and evil, as it can be prompted to reveal loopholes in smart contracts.

Stephen Tong, co-founder of smart contract auditing firm Zellic asked ChatGPT to help find an exploit, presenting a piece of smart contract code.

OMG WTF pic.twitter.com/I2hE0e5ppq
— cts (@gf_256) December 1, 2022

The bot responded by noting the contract had a reentrancy vulnerability where an exploiter could repeatedly withdraw the funds from the contract and provided an example of how to fix the issue.

This similar type of exploit was used in May by the attacker of the Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Fei Protocol who made off with $80 million.

Others have shared results from the chatbot after prompting it with vulnerable smart contracts. Twitter user devtooligan shared a screenshot of ChatGPT, which provided the exact code needed to fix a Solidity smart contract vulnerability commenting “we're all gonna be out of a job.”

omg. seriously mind-blown

we're all gonna be out of a job pic.twitter.com/iwjjOTPDLY
— devtooligan (@devtooligan) December 1, 2022

With the tool, Twitter users have already begun to jest they’re able to now start businesses for security auditing simply by using the bot to test for weaknesses in smart contracts.

Excited to announce I'm raising for my new smart contract security consulting company.
It's gonna be me just be throwing ChatGPT to fuzz your code. https://t.co/gSFyABd9M6
— eddie (⬅️,) (@0x_eddie) December 1, 2022

Cointelegraph tested ChatGPT and found it can also create an example smart contract from a prompt using simple language, generating code that could apparently provide staking rewards for Ethereum-based nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

*ChatGPT’s example Solidity smart contract for NFT staking rewards from a simple prompt. Image: Cointelegraph.*

Despite the chatbot's ability to test smart contract functionality, it wasn’t solely designed for that purpose and many on Twitter have suggested some of the smart contracts it generates have issues.

The tool also might provide different responses depending on the way it’s prompted, so it isn't perfect.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that the tool was “an early demo” and is “very much a research release.”

He opined that “language interfaces are going to be a big deal” and tools such as ChatGPT will “soon” have the ability to answer questions and give advice with later iterations completing tasks or even discovering new knowledge.

Meta reportedly plans ‘large-scale layoffs,’ but what of its metaverse division?

November 7, 2022 Coin Telegraph

artificial intelligence

As of the end of September, Meta had more than 87,000 employees — a large proportion of which is said to work in the Reality Labs division.

Social media and tech giant Meta is reportedly gearing up for “large-scale layoffs” this week amid rising costs and a recent collapse of its share price.

According to Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on Nov. 6 citing people familiar with the matter, the planned layoffs could impact thousands of employees in a broad range of divisions across Meta’s 87,000-strong workforce.

It is not currently understood whether the firm's Reality Labs division, which registered a $3.7 billion loss in the third quarter, would see staff cuts.

Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would be focusing its investment on “a small number of high-priority growth areas," including its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Discovery Engine and its advertisement and business messaging platforms in addition to the Metaverse, stating:

“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year [...] In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”

During the earnings call, the billionaire entrepreneur appeared to double down on the firm’s investments in these areas, saying he believes they’re “on the right track with these investments” and should “keep investing heavily in these areas.”

The report comes only a week after Meta reported its third-quarter earnings, which missed revenue expectations and saw a rise in its operating costs. Its stock price also took a battering, with shares in Meta currently priced at $90.79 — down 7.56% over the last five days and 73.19% year-on-year, according to Yahoo Finance.

The company appears to still be actively hiring into its metaverse division regardless, with its list of job openings revealing 38 of its 413 listings are related to Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.

Cointelegraph has reached out to Meta for clarification and whether there would be any changes to its metaverse division but did not receive an immediate response.

Zuckerberg’s $100B metaverse gamble is ‘super-sized and terrifying,’ shareholder says

October 25, 2022 Coin Telegraph

<div>Zuckerberg's 0B metaverse gamble is 'super-sized and terrifying,' shareholder says</div>

Altimeter Capital

In an open letter, Altimeter Capital's CEO and founder recommended the tech giant cut its Metaverse investments from $10-15 billion a year to $5 billion.

A shareholder’s open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has labeled the tech giant's investment into the Metaverse as “super-sized and terrifying.”

The shareholder has urged the company to scale down its investment in the Metaverse and its related technology arm amid a significant fall in its stock price over the last 18 months.

The open letter was published on Oct. 24 and was directed at Zuckerberg and the board of directors. It was authored by Brad Gerstner, CEO and founder of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital, which owns roughly a 0.11% share in Meta, according to Hedge Follow.

Gerstner said that Meta’s foray into the Metaverse, while important, should not command as much investment from the company as it currently does.

He said the company has announced investments of $10 billion to $15 billion per year into its Metaverse project, including AR/ VR tech and Horizon World, but “may take 10 years to yield results," explaining:

"An estimated $100B+ investment in an unknown future is super-sized and terrifying, even by Silicon Valley standards.”

Rather, he has urged the company to focus more on artificial intelligence (AI) and less on the Metaverse, as it “has the potential to drive more economic productivity than the internet itself.”

“While most companies will struggle to monetize AI, we believe Meta is incredibly well positioned to leverage AI to make all of its existing products better,” he added.

Gestner’s comments come on the same day the Bank of America downgraded Meta from a “buy” to “neutral” valuation, partly due to its Metaverse investments likely to remain an “overhang” on the stock because of the “lack of progress” and “new competition from Apple.”

Gerstner added that over the last 18 months, Meta’s stock has fallen 55% compared to an average of 19% for its “big-tech peers,” which he suggests “mirrors the lost confidence in the company, not just the bad mood of the market.”

Gerstner isn’t the only person to think the future of the Metaverse is a relatively “uncertain” one either.

On Jul. 30, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that while “the Metaverse will happen,” corporate attempts such as those by Facebook will “misfire” because “it’s far too early to know what people actually want.”

The share price for Meta Platforms Inc (META) has plummeted 60.53% over the last year to $129.72 at the time of writing – a far greater fall in the current bear market than the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google.

Meta is set to report its third-quarter 2022 results on Oct. 26.

Blockchain-Based Platform Created by Saudi Students Places Third in National Women’s Coding Competition

October 18, 2022 Bitcoin.com

OCC Chief Says Government and Academics Need To Help Set Standards for Stablecoin Regulation

April 27, 2022 The Daily Hodl

Little-Known Altcoin Explodes 207% After Surprise Listing From Crypto Exchange Giant

April 1, 2022 The Daily Hodl

Meta unveils Metaverse AI supercomputer, claims it will be world’s fastest

January 25, 2022 Coin Telegraph

artificial intelligence

The social media giant said that the “AI Research SuperCluster” supercomputer is already operational, and it expects it will be fully completed around the middle of the year.

Facebook’s parent company Meta says that its newly-created artificial intelligence (AI) “Research SuperCluster” (RSC) will “pave the way” towards building the Metaverse.

The social media giant said that it believes RSC is already one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and will snag the top spot when it’s fully operational in mid-2022, according to a Jan, 24 blog post unveiling the hardware.

“Developing the next generation of advanced AI will require powerful new computers capable of quintillions of operations per second,” wrote the company.

“Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform — the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role.”

CEO Mark Zuckerberg added in a Jan. 25 Facebook post:

“The experiences we're building for the metaverse require enormous compute power (quintillions of operations/second!) and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more.”

The machine will be able to work across hundreds of different languages to develop “advanced AI” for computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition.

“We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together.”

Meta didn’t disclose where the computer is located, or the costs associated with its development and creation.

Decentralized finance analyst Camilla Russo compared Meta’s new machine to the Ethereum network, which is considered by some in the industry to be a global “supercomputer” of sorts already.

facebook @Meta builds a supercomputer in private to better monetize users' data in its metaverse.

ethereum builds a world computer in the open that allows users to control their data in the metaverse.

not the same. https://t.co/lTFIFRw840
— Camila Russo (@CamiRusso) January 24, 2022

In Dec. 2021, Vice President of Intel’s accelerated computing systems and graphics group, Raja Koduri, said that current computational infrastructure will need to improve a thousand-fold in order to power the Metaverse.

“You need to access to petaflops [one thousand teraflops] of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for real-time uses,” Koduri told Quartz at the time.

Largely described as the next iteration of the internet, the Metaverse refers to a virtual space where people can work, play and socialize – often by using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology.

In October, Facebook rebranded as Meta to reflect its renewed focus beyond social media.