Crypto, web3, bitcoin, doge, luna, token, NFT, trade, sell, decentralized, dip, and dump have been talk of the town during the 21/22 lockdown period on twitter tech bro communities where all they could talk about was web3 being the future.

Memes were made, money was dumped to create projects, spread the word about decentralization and people casually scrolling through their social feeds got into the web3 and traded crypto for some returns.

The lockdown made folks be like - “baithe baithe kya kare, karna he kuch kaam“, many getting into investing for the first time while our tech bros are plotting and scheming on making the next web3 unicorn.

It is an interesting engineering problem to solve, web3 has real-world usecases with solid tech fundamentals to solve and improve but the space quickly filled with noise where only a few solved actual issues. The current web3 solution is all but experimentation at its early stages with new tech, it has not solved a problem and generated value at scale.

But looking at things from the outside web3 always felt like - a solution looking for a problem.

When the looming recession started showing off its true colors all the crypto bros started panic selling and the SBF/FTX saga happened. It built bad press around the crypto and the boat started sinking slowly but surely.

The FTX saga, and how SBF never got arrested for all the customer money he lost, committing one of the biggest frauds while still not facing any serious charges from the authorities suggests something is up.

Tech trends in general runs in cycles. Some trends live longer than others.

We have seen similar trend cycles in tech where AI for once was the top field to get into, data science was another and this time around it is web3 and crypto.

The hype has died down but it is a great case study to solve how these trends influence and impact people and their jobs/interests.

Looking at these hype cycles from a macro lens and trying to understand patterns shows how a lot of this was also a side-effect of the US money printing exercise and economic actions taken by governments during the initial days of COVID.

Trends and interactions generally occur in cycles and can be applied to most things. Look at the economic order and the changes we see in the power struggle between the west and the rest of the world.

Explained in detail by Ray Dalio in his book - Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

Many tangents not too much time to write, sigh.

Web4 and beyond - The AI Wars

We are to see multiple web[x] and how the internet evolves as we move to automate most tasks and leave decision-making to humans. Similar to the aviation industry where the “best pilot is autopilot”, though we still have human pilots to make decisions that can have adverse impact.

Such will be the state of affairs. I see similar things happening in tech and most places in general.

Something new that has now taken the tech bro community by storm recently is the rise of AI tooling and chatbots - thanks to Open AI’s - ChatGPT, Microsoft, and Google.

This hype around the space is bigger than web3 and rightly so as it generates value for users - improving productivity at the end of the day.

And it’s exciting to watch all these big shots getting back into eating out each other’s market share. More like 3D chess unfolding in front of us with Google, Microsoft, and the rest.

Elon is on the sidelines still making news with his birdie app on how the AI is not tweaked right and has a bias in its LLMs. There are inconsistencies and actions that need to be taken a look at.

Google on the other hand is in a situation where they now have to step up even though they have a cash cow generating revenue like no other, but boi has Microsoft hit the nail on the head targetting the most lucrative segment of search and redefining it as we see, taking a piece of Google’s pie and trying to “make them dance.“

Google Bard has been a mess - from the announcement, the launch, and the whole response. Their recent news on internal employees reporting of the AI being sentient doesn’t help either. Google has mostly focused on AI for its at-scale problems and integrating it across Google products. It was always there but never the most important feature.

Now it’s time to commercialize and bring it front and center. Google’s AI capabilities are not short of amazing - Google Lens, Google Camera with its image processing, Deepmind, and more are a few examples of how Google can take up the challenge with Microsoft.

Now it’s time to grab your popcorns and see the 3D chess unfolds building new versions of the web as we see.

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