Web3 Innovators - #66 - Will Artificial General Intelligence help to close the Web3 skills gap?

#66 - Will Artificial General Intelligence help to close the Web3 skills gap?

03/08/23 • 18 min

In the sixth episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson has the tables turned on him and is interviewed by Joshua Lory, Head of Blockchain GTM at VMware, a multi-cloud service for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control.

These were follow up questions that Joshua wanted to ask Conor after he was interviewed on the podcast earlier this season, which you can listen to here.

Connect with Joshua on Twitter.

Episode highlights:

Who Conor believes are the three players that will capture 80% of the market in the next 10 years and why
How this differs from Joshua’s views
Other up and coming players in this space who it is worth keeping an eye on
Why the decentralised infrastructure projects have got a big part to play in the future
How we narrow the skills gap needed for these new ecosystems
The issue with smart contract development on public blockchain networks
The potential with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to help close the skills gap

Key Takeaways:

In every single technology space the top three players capture 80% of the market time and time again. And then you have a long tail of the 20%, where you have thousands of different options that capture one or 2%. - Joshua
Ethereum, I've always felt that it's like the Linux of this generation. - Conor
From a personal perspective, I think Polka Dot is building a strong ecosystem. They have some very strong technology in terms of what they've done. So they're model of having this layer zero blockchain and then these power chains, which are kind of permission chains spun up on top, seems to be viable. - Conor
We’ve got 10 million Java developers that could be writing to this new ecosystem, but are not. - Joshua
The real challenge with smart contract development is that it, especially on public blockchain networks, is that people can't afford to make mistakes with it. - Conor

Resources:

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These were follow up questions that Joshua wanted to ask Conor after he was interviewed on the podcast earlier this season, which you can listen to here.

Connect with Joshua on Twitter.

Episode highlights:

Who Conor believes are the three players that will capture 80% of the market in the next 10 years and why
How this differs from Joshua’s views
Other up and coming players in this space who it is worth keeping an eye on
Why the decentralised infrastructure projects have got a big part to play in the future
How we narrow the skills gap needed for these new ecosystems
The issue with smart contract development on public blockchain networks
The potential with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to help close the skills gap

Key Takeaways:

In every single technology space the top three players capture 80% of the market time and time again. And then you have a long tail of the 20%, where you have thousands of different options that capture one or 2%. - Joshua
Ethereum, I've always felt that it's like the Linux of this generation. - Conor
From a personal perspective, I think Polka Dot is building a strong ecosystem. They have some very strong technology in terms of what they've done. So they're model of having this layer zero blockchain and then these power chains, which are kind of permission chains spun up on top, seems to be viable. - Conor
We’ve got 10 million Java developers that could be writing to this new ecosystem, but are not. - Joshua
The real challenge with smart contract development is that it, especially on public blockchain networks, is that people can't afford to make mistakes with it. - Conor

Resources:

Previous Episode

#65 - Where is Ethereum headed?

In the fifth episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by Ben Edgington, is the founder and lead product owner of Teku, an Ethereum 2.0 client at ConsenSys.

Episode highlights:

Why Ben decided to work exclusively on proof of stake and scalability of Ethereum
The surprises with Ethereum governance
The pragmatism surrounding Ethereum and knowing it may not immediately be perfect
The alternatives to Ethereum and where Ben sees compromises being made
How the Ethereum ecosystem has been expanded and what this means for adoption and new technologies
The Shanghai Hard Fork and Shanghai Stroke Capella upgrades and what this will mean for ETH staking
Why institutions are happy to stake in ETH
The areas of focus for Ben moving forward
What the Ethereum ecosystem needs to achieve just to give every person on the planet one transaction per day
The e-book that Ben is currently working on outlining the specifications for Ethereum’s protocols

Key Takeaways:

It was basically chaos. And yet somehow order emerges from the chaos. And I've come to believe this is really important for the health of Ethereum. We purport to be open and permissionless and we have to design and build our protocols in a way that reflects that. - Ben
I'm not an Ethereum maximalist, right? I don't think there should be Ethereum and nothing else. I'm very much for other approaches and explorations of the design space as long as people are aware of the compromises that are being made. - Ben
The upcoming Shanghai Stroke Capella upgrade. This is gonna happen in, my guess, early April and will unlock the rewards that stakers have put down. Currently we've got, it's about 16 million ETH staking, which is extraordinary, over half a million validators. - Ben
In the longer term, we need a solution in which every node on the network does not need to see every piece of data. - Ben
We are not going to get into infinite scalability, but for one transaction per day for everybody on the planet, we need a hundred thousand transactions per second. So there's a sort of order of magnitude estimate for when the Ethereum main net becomes capable. - Ben

Resources:

Next Episode

#67 - How is blockchain evolving in TradFi?

In the seventh episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by David Creer, Global DLT and Crypto Lead at GFT Group who develop sustainable solutions across new technologies.

He is also a Course Instructor at the European Tech School.

Episode highlights:

What initially drew David’s interest into the space
How GFT has evolved into an innovation driven organisation
How product delivery and production differs within financial services
Why there used to be hesitation when putting products into production
How regulation has evolved within the financial sector
How David sees Crypto developing with banks
David’s advice for anyone uncertain about the application of blockchain
The UDPN network project that David has been involved in (The UDPN is a decentralised payments messaging backbone connecting the digital currency systems of the future to enable seamless, efficient payments of regulated stablecoins and CBDCs)
How David things blockchain will influence the way financial markets operate in the future

Key Takeaways:

The tier one banks and the tier two banks are really only working on things that they want to take into production at this point in time. So that's a completely different mindset from how things were when we started, where it was, we want to just see whether this is possible. - David
When cloud first came out banks didn't want to go down that route at all. The policy was non-public cloud. Now a lot of banks are going down that path, which makes sense because it saves them a lot of money and it's more efficient. - David
If you're thinking about using blockchain or distributed ledger technology for your project, you need to understand your use case really well. - David
It's quite exciting to be involved in that because potentially that could be a really important piece of infrastructure for the financial system of the future. - David
If smart cities develop the way that they are developing in countries such as China, I think that we will have a financial services system which is much more focused on micropayment. And therefore I think that blockchain technology or cryptographically based stablecoins or CBDCs will be used much more widely. - David

Connect with David on Twitter

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