Today we’re celebrating four letter F-words! Congrats to FRAX on the huge launch of Fraxtal. We’ll be covering their new chain in far more depth in coming days and months, but for now we’ll refer you to their launch thread:
Frok My Life
If I hadn’t jumped full time into crypto, it’s safe to say I’d be doing something around AI right now. Because… that’s what I was doing before I jumped in full-time. And basically the past decade of life or so I’ve been either doing crypto or AI stuff.
ChatGPT is clearly a quantum leap forward, and I still use it as a productivity multiplier for a variety of odd tasks each day. Alas, it’s not good enough to write this newsletter for me yet. Yet it can occasionally help with simple tasks like proofreading or generating some concepts.
I’m also aware of normie reactions to OpenAI. Largely, the mood is a collective shrug. A lot of people, true to form, are excessively quick to point out the flaws while downplaying the fact it’s a fairly miraculous breakthrough. Some are even downright hostile, an odd reaction but a good hint that their team are onto something.
The delta between “good” and “great” is where I’m curious. Perhaps the “uncanny valley” effect that separates digital art from reality may also remain pronounced with chatbox AIs for some time? A good AI response tends to be ~60% of the way to what you want. It’s a remarkable achievement… but getting to 99% may be a slog, and 100% may well be impossible.
Or so I thought, before I came across Frok…
Pretty Frokkin’ Good
Building a good chatbot is tough. I’ve tried to have a basic conversation with ChatGPT. No amount of contortions to the prompts I’ve been able to imagine has been able to render the Chatbot a half-decent conversationalist. I challenge you to turn on the OpenAI audio and try to get it to talk to you and produce a remotely interesting diaglogue. I figured it was impossible at our present level of technology.
Then I booted up the Frok Discord, and was amazed to see the uncanny valley bridged successfully. The Frok bot being tested is good enough to just hang out with the degens and act like an extremely knowledgeable part of the crew.
My obsession with the uncanny valley may seems like a minor thing, but it’s everything. If the bot is not fun to talk with, it will simply die out over time. If it’s fun to talk to, it can go viral. A seemingly small leap forward can result in major gains…
Frok could be a game-changer. Crypto culture happens in these tiny chatrooms, maybe a dozen people per Discord trading intel among themselves. These rooms contain a huge amount of crypto knowledge and industry jargon, mixed with memework and a healthy dose of absurdist humor that keeps users glued online every waking hour. A proper bot could seamlessly 💩-post with the crew, while also assembling as a repository of knowledge for all these random crypto conversations.
In fact, the need for Frok to have a degree of “humanity” is discussed directly on their tech outline.
It’s the sort of technology that has the potential to align perfectly with Frok’s ambitious vision:
Having talked with the developer, I won’t leak the specifics for how their bot is so much better than the garden variety OpenAI, but suffice to say their attack on the problem is impressive. They are seriously considering thoughtful solutions to major problems they’ll surely encounter building a project at this scale:
Privacy: Properly anonymizing data, so as to aggregate knowledge among servers without leaking private data
Sybil Resistance: Preventing spambots from injecting scam information into the training data
Sustainability: Building a robust business model and tokenomics around the entire package.
That last piece is just that — Frok is not a web2 bot, but a fully web3-native complex organism, right down to it’s tokenomics. The scarcity of blockspace is the perfect check and balance to the over-abundance of AI garbage content. From Frok’s mission:
The docs in their entirety are worth a read, as they carry more heft and gravitas than the median crypto white paper. A single implementation of a Frok chatbot is cute, but aggregated among multiple servers and platformized it functions as an army.
A few years ago, cryptocurrency began to shed more information than any single human could process, so degens organized ourselves into tribes to better track this intel. Now that cryptocurrency’s collective information output has surpassed what a whole group can process, we need even greater capacity. Frok has the potential to fill this role and become a sort of “soft AGI for Web3.”
True “Artificial General Intelligence” may be anywhere from days to decades away, but it’s extremely likely we’ll see domain specific AGI pop up first. Frok feels like we could leapfrog a few waves of innovation to speedrun towards this outcome. For the first time in history it will be possible to own an AI agent that generates revenue by providing utility on the internet. If that doesn't scream singularity, then I dare you to unfasten your seatbelt.
It’s all bullish for the parent organization Tadpole Labs. They’re approaching this entire endeavor as a proper research company, which puts the team in an extremely advantageous position if they succeed. One can imagine them shedding OpenAI’s sanctimonious constraints and deploying their own proprietary model.
Armed with such power, what might they do? Build and launch their own network of dApps? Automate arbitrage trading? Weaponize 💩-posting on 𝕏? We only pray our new crypto overlords prove benevolent.
We know Frok is already training its bot to develop a taste for our tokens. Frok transactions occur entirely onchain. The bot will be paid and fueled by keeping your wallet charged with sufficient ether.
Tadpole Labs is presently raising 400 ETH (20%) at a 2000 ETH FDV. Their token generation event is going through two rounds, the first is open to a whitelist from a select group of people (including The Llamas) and capped at 6.9420 ETH per wallet, and they’ve already raised 309 ETH (over 77% of the way to their target).
More details about the TGE on their documentation and, of course, in their Discord.
Disclaimers! Author took part in the first TGE round for Frok, lest we find ourselves turned into a paperclip…