The Format #047
VIBEware, Presidential meme's, the Transistor 2.0 and how Fiverr is bringing AI to the gig economy.
Happy Friday! 🌞
Another fortnight gone!
This year has flew by so far. I guess that’s what happens when you’re hard at work…
Lot’s of exciting things are being cooked up in the Open Format Labs, and last week alone we had almost 200,000 transactions and over 60,000 users. 🚀
Anyway, here’s what we’ll be exploring today:
The reason why we’ll all be building with vibes 🤘
How to learn all the fundamentals about AI in 3 hours? 🤯
Why you want to get a receipt for your 5k run? 🏃♂️
How to create a personal assistant to help with your gig work? 💰
Let’s jump in…
How Web3 is Unlocking Billions in New Revenue for Clubs & Brands
This livestream by 51 Insights dived really deep into the future of fan engagement in the sports industry, a space where there is a lot of opportunity.
Here were my top takeaways:
Up until now the sports industry has had an ‘advertising halo effect’: brands like the association with their favourite sports clubs so they have been far less metric-focused than in other industries. This is changing. Fast.
Current ‘fan loyalty’ programmes are focused mainly on the diehard fans, fans who already spend a lot of money on the club. This is completely missing the long tail of fans. The ones who are closer to passive fans.
Most clubs have an insanely poor understanding of who their fans are, where they interact and what drives them. They can’t make personalised experiences because they don’t have enough understanding to personalise.
Airlines make most of their money from their miles programmes, in many cases they give the customer say $0.01 per mile and then make $0.02 or $0.03 back from sponsorships, a similar opportunity exists in the sports industry.
Some of the approaches discussed on this stream were particularly interesting to me and the Open Format team since we’re actually working with Matchain and PSG to help solve a lot of these problems within football. We’ve made some awesome progress so far, but there is a lot more to come!
Fiverr wants gig workers to offload some of their work to AI
Whether you think the gig economy is good or bad, exploitative or a lifeline, it certainly forms a big part of the world we live in today. A LOT of money travels through the gig economy, and that’s what makes Fiverr’s recent announcement so interesting (and concerning?): to ‘formally’ bring AI to gig work.
This could offer gig workers a way to scale and leverage themselves like never before, and could massively shift the average persons relationship with this sort of work.
Fiverr claim that this move “is about making our freelancers irreplaceable, not obsolete” and that they built the features “to ensure creators remain at the center of the creative economy.” Are they being sincere here though? Your guess is as good as mine.
Especially since now gig workers will essentially be pressured into paying for (yes each tool costs $25+ per month) and using these tools in order to keep up.
They are definitely working on some interesting tools though, their personal assistant is especially interesting with how it uses the freelancers past engagements to matchmake and hopefully improve a freelancers sales funnel.
We’re working on something very similar (and hopefully far more useful 😉) for communities to help onboard, understand, assign tasks for and pay their community members. More on that soon…
Deep Dive into LLM’s like ChatGPT
Most people talk about AI in incredibly abstract ways. The amount of interactions I’ve had which go something like this:
Them: “Can I just get AI to do [insert random task] for me?”
Me: “Maybe but it’s not that simple, you need to think about X, Y and Z”
Them: “Oh, okay, what about [insert another random task]? Can it do that?”
And I 100% get it, it’s easy to want to try and solve a problem by just hitting it with the big ol’ AI solution, but you can’t do that without having some fundamental understanding of the mystical AI and how it can be used to solve problems.
Now I don’t think everyone should spend 100 hours learning, building and using AI (even though it would be an incredibly eye-opening and useful experience for most).
But I do think everyone should set aside 3 hours and watch this immensely valuable video from Andrej Karpathy, one of the co-founders of OpenAI and the ex-director of AI at Tesla. It covers literally everything you need to know to demystify what ChatGPT is doing and why it works so god damn well!
Argentina's Memecoin Disaster Is Worse Than You Think
Right before he got into office Donald Trump released the TRUMP token, then came the MELANIA token. Unfortunately this seems to have set the precedent for presidents releasing memecoin tokens (let’s make sure to not confuse this with all the positive ways blockchain could be used).
Last Friday the Argentinian President Javier Milei promoted a memecoin called $LIBRA, what happened next was (pardon the language) an absolute shit show, with a huge amount of retail investors, who may or may not have been Argentinian citizens, losing a LOT of money.
The details around this disaster are awful, there seems to be so much corruption involved, and this interview with between Coffeezilla and Hayden Davis (one of the people involved in the token launch), shines a light on the dark side of these president or influencer led memecoins.
It would be very easy to argue that the problem here is purely memecoins and all of them are bad. There may be some truth in that argument, but actually we think there are a lot of improvements that could be made to the mechanisms around the token launch.
Either way… yuck. News like this, and the actions of a few always unfairly taint web3 and make it harder to showcase the true value the technology can have.
Other articles + videos we’ve found interesting this week…
Vibe Coding - A New System of the World → The rapidly improving quality and speed of AI generated code is opening up a completely new industry: Vibeware… Development tools that prioritise creator experience and facilitate a value-adding creative flow that was previously reserved for genius coders. Will these be the tools that truly unleash the power of the generalist? 👀
Receipts for your workout → So you did a run, tracked it on Strava, and now you create a run receipt. Wait what? Why would you want that? Well by porting the run (or any exercise) data onchain you now get access to discounts in all your favourite sports brands, plus you get a lower health insurance premium. Oh, and the brands get access to a high LTV customer. Proof of health, pretty cool? 🏃♂️
Microsoft announces quantum computing breakthrough with new Majorana 1 chip → Without getting into the (super interesting) technical details: Microsoft have created an awesome new material, a material which has let them create ‘the transistor of the quantum age’. Why does this matter? Well the ‘old school’ transistors changed the world and are the reason Silicon Valley has it’s name…
A Farcaster AI Agent Trained on Video Content → This piece is about someone who built an AI agent that helps summarise tonnes of interesting things, but that’s not really what I took away. To me this (rather inspiring) story, talks to some important facts that are becoming more and more true:
Anyone can (and should) make a useful AI agent, regardless of their technical level
You can (and should) improve a users experience, even in just a small way
You can (and should) meet a user where they are at, in terms of platform, experience and expectations
Agents need UX too, but AIUX doesn’t need to be hard.
The flawed concept of ownership in Web3 → Paragraph.xyz, a ‘web3 blogging platform’ (that we actually use for Happy Hacking) has recently changed their CSS customisation options, and in doing so changed the appearance of countless blogs. This led 0xAntidote.eth to ask the question, if I don’t own my blogs appearance, what other parts don’t I own? The TL;DR, ownership is a trade off.
Leaving you with a question…
This last post was SUPER interesting to me. We use the term ownership so regularly and freely, even more so in the web3 space, but I definitely don’t spend very much time thinking about what I’m really meaning when I say ownership.
With that in mind:
What does ownership mean to you? Does it change depending on the context? What parts of ownership would you be willing to sacrifice and which parts are 100% must haves?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments, or in our Discord.
That’s all for this week.
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Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
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Image generated by Dall-E 2 using the prompt: “A group of developers coding in an ultra-futuristic, neon-drenched dreamscape, completely immersed in creative flow. The environment is alive—holographic screens shift and morph, pulsing with vibrant, animated code. Waves of music and colorful energy ripple through the air, forming abstract patterns and glowing symbols. The developers float in a zero-gravity workspace, their bodies infused with pure creative energy. Their expressions radiate euphoria as they build with pure instinct, lost in the rhythm of innovation. The scene blends cyberpunk, digital psychedelia, and an ethereal dreamworld, with a massive neon sign reading 'VIBE CODING' glowing like a mantra in the background.”