Mikeal Rogers: [47:53] And because all of these are protocols, and because they’re all cryptographically secure, there are new things that we could do that we weren’t able to do before around securitizing them. You can literally do something like create a sort of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and say “Okay, this DAO is going to get this amount of money from these people to buy these NFTs, and then it’s going to sell them on this particular cycle, and then that money is gonna come back to those people.” And you can even wire up decentralized finance into these systems. So people can trade assets related to the entire lifecycle.

Yotam Mann: Yeah, this was really for Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst the purpose of the project; the age of this, exactly what you’re describing, Daniel - this is coming. And they wanted to kind of control that story and offer a version of how this could go. So they have a whole mechanism for how things that are created with this - they’re free and they’re able to be used, but the ownership is actually through a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). That’s their version of how this rights management could go. But I think that those are the most relevant questions when you think about these types of generative models.

Our version of this and how we have been producing and thinking about the future models that we produce is really full transparency, full attribution, and also when we get to it being able to pay the artists back that went into this model.

I have some frustration with a lot of the way that machine learning stuff goes, where it’s not fully attributed datasets, or a lot of scraped datasets, and things like that… So we are trying to kind of do the hard tech in the opposite direction. All the datasets that we have are open source, or we hired our friends or musicians that we know to create a dataset that is fully licensed for this purpose of creating a generative model… And then I think when people are able to en-masse create their own generative models, then there is a really big opportunity for creating value for those institutions, like getting paid for the generative use of or the licensing of that generator. So that’s kind of how I see that potential future.

Preston Van Loon: I think the amazing part about this technology is that while there are no rules, you really get your opportunity to define those rules. So you’re able to develop what are called smart contracts, or these decentralized applications which - everyone can read them and understand what’s going on, what are the constraints of this protocol that you’ve launched on Ethereum. And if you’re talking about true decentralization, there are these concepts where you can have what’s called a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), which is a group of anonymous people that have voting rights in the protocol and are able to make the upgrades and change the rules.

With Ethereum, or really any blockchain, it’s like a write-once-and-read-many-time kind of style database, and you’re not able to remove or delete or change anything unless that’s part of the code that you’ve written. And as a participant or user in your protocol, I can see that and I can base my risk assessment “Do I wanna be part of this application?” I can read the code and find out for myself.

Peer Richelsen: It’s very early days, yeah. It’s literally ground zero, and we were awarded with Product of The Day, I believe 400 up votes, and one of the tweets actually went viral with more than 250,000 impressions, and I think like 900 comments, and I don’t know how many hundreds of retweets.

To put it in a nutshell, we built an integration, and there’s many integrations. We have Zoom integration, and other integrations, that is Web3-compatible, which means you can request ownership of a certain token as a matter of verification to book someone’s time. I, myself, I’m in the Orange DAO, which is the Y Combinator, like the unofficial Y Combinator DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization that is investing in other YC crypto projects. So it’s a mix of like a VC firm, but very decentralized. There’s no single CEO or president. Everyone can vote on proposals, and it’s settled on a blockchain. And we have our own token, which is the Orange token. And now what I’m doing is I can publicly send a link on Twitter or in the discord of the Orange DAO or on a public website, and only people from the Orange DAO who own the same token can book my calendar. And that’s amazing for office hours, for group calls, but even for sales meetings or some other stuff where you need a certain gate, and you don’t want to have everyone book your time.

Nader Dabit: DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

Gavin Wood: Sure. The DAO, if you’re not aware, stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Essentially, it’s a means of bringing various people together into some form of bound contract, or some bound set of interests. The idea behind the DAO is more or less like a fund, a VC fund. It can back particular endeavors, and the idea is that the endeavors will ultimately make money, or create value, and push the value back into the DAO so that all of the members of the DAO get in some sense richer.

Now, you can buy into the DAO - that was the idea - by depositing Ether under the control of this DAO contract. It’s a bit of an odd thing to say, “Well, putting money under control of a contract? How does that work?” But that’s exactly how it works - you write some software, and the software states the logic of this agreement, of this multilateral agreement, and part of the logic is saying under what circumstances money should be transferred. In most the same way that you might have a joint bank account where you need both signatures before the money is transferred, so is the case for the DAO. Under the DAO, it will happen with four thousand or five thousand signatories, and there’s some much more complex thing about how many of them had to agree to it before funds were transferred. But nonetheless, basically it’s that kind of thing. It’s a shared bank account with very particular logic for who gets what money, and for hopefully integrating the eventual ventures back into the DAO so the DAO itself can reward those who backed the right venture.

Kris Brandow: Yeah. DAO stands for Data Access Object.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Sometimes there’s stuff that you just want a machine to do, though, or I could see it being useful… Like, knowing that if I’m interacting with a smart contract, and it’s going to do what the code says, and there’s no risk that that person will not keep up their end of the bargain - that can be kind of useful. The other part of that that’s cool to me is that it’s like it is actually kind of like a new computer science primitive, in a sense; like, you have this new thing that you can do, that wasn’t possible before… I just would like to see people doing more interesting things with it.

[38:05] And I think the part where it seems to fall down today is related to what you’re saying, Kball, which is anytime it needs to touch the real world… Like this DAO store, for example - probably it was coordinated through a contract, and there were these rules and stuff, but at the end of the day, somebody has to go and like make the store work; open the store up. And then at that point, you’re just sort of - like, what are they doing? There’s no way to validate that they’re doing – as soon as it connects to the real world, it just falls apart, right? There’s no way to make sure that that happens, and that all involves like trust, and humans, and stuff like that. And so yeah, that’s the problem I see.