OpenAI's ChatGPT is making waves in the rapidly evolving world of AI tools, prompting Web3 companies to leverage the technology for blockchain exploration. On Wednesday, leading blockchain platform developer Alchemy announced the launch of its latest project, AlchemyAI—a GPT-4 plugin for blockchain analysis.
"Our idea here was to specifically cater to and train a model using ChatGPT that is Web3 development-specific," Elan Halpern, Product Manager at Alchemy, told Decrypt in an interview.
A plugin is a software add-on designed to integrate other applications into ChatGPT. The AlchemyAI plugin, Halpern explained, translates natural language inputs—such as "Show me the most recent block and the transactions in that block”—into requests that are sent to the Alchemy API. It then returns the results in a user-friendly format.
In this interview, Decrypt's Jason Nelson chats with Alchemy product manager and AlchemyAI project lead Elan Halpern on blockchain analysis using ChatGPT, what AI means for better user experience, and the need to fact-check AI. Halpern also gives a demo of the new AlchemyAI ChatGPT plugin.
"This is real-time querying on the blockchain, like a developer would, using the API and writing a code script," Halpern said. "This allows you to do that through natural language and normal sentences."
Other GPT-4 plugins for blockchain analysis include DeFiLlama, Sic, and CheckTheChain. Solana Labs also launched its own ChatGPT plugin in May.
While a date for the public launch of the AlchemyAI suite was not given, Halpern said it includes the ChatGPT plugin and an AI assistant tool called Chat Web3, which assists developers in the programming process.
"It's like your partner-pairing Web3 expert in the space,” Halpern said, “that allows you to answer questions and get debugging help.”
Launched in 2017, Alchemy is often described as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) of blockchain. The software development company builds applications across several networks, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
In February, Alchemy launched an open-source developer platform for building decentralized applications called the Create Web3 Dapp (or CW3D). Now it’s turning its attention to AI to harness the technology to help users understand blockchain better.
"What OpenAI is doing, and the AI space in general, is fundamentally improving users' experience," Halpern said. "Typing a question into this chat, and getting the result without having to go through a million links and without having to reference any other places, is a better experience than prior."
But while Halpern is bullish on AI, she did acknowledge the flaws—including a default information cut-off date of 2021 for ChatGPT, and the habit of AI chatbots sometimes making up facts, a phenomenon known in the industry as “hallucinations.”
Plugins have become crucial in learning, understanding, and interacting with artificial intelligence. Thanks to the flexibility provided by OpenAI's ChatGPT, chatbots are appearing everywhere and becoming more nuanced.
What is a plugin?
A "ChatGPT plugin" is a software add-on developers design that integrates other applications into ChatGPT's AI chatbot, enabling features beyond what ChatGPT was initially designed to provide. These plugins manage the interaction between the application and the C...
"It's super important to fact-check and double-check," she said. "This is new technology, and we're going to be ultra-transparent about what we're training our models on, so that people and developers especially can know where this information is coming from and the limitations."
"I think [AI] is game-changing for everyone," Halpern added. "But we need to make sure we're checking all the information that these things are spitting out to us—including the ones that Alchemy uses."
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