I’m the Kyber Now.
News for November 30. Also: Elon at Dealbook, Grok A.I., Trevor Milton Sentencing ... and a Conceptual Weapon Against A.I. Doomers
In this edition:
Alva Noe’s Defense of Embodied Knowledge
Elon Musk’s Dealbook Flip-Out
Grok is Coming
Nikola Fraudster’s Sentencing is Imminent
Kyber Hacker Wants the Whole Company
No Meaning Without Bodies?
I spent last night at the release party for The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, the new book from UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noe. As I mentioned on Twitter, David Byrne of the Talking Heads showed up. New York is wild.
But more importantly, Noe’s focus on the relationship between knowledge and action, and specifically between knowledge and *bodies in action*, seems like a very useful line of rebuttal against the bizarre delusions of the Artificial Intelligence Doomer crowd. Noe told me that he had actually been invited to visit OpenAI to discuss his work, and almost immediately ran into an engineer who tried to convince him that Large Language Models are conscious beings. We shared an exasperated sigh.
Just to gauge interest, if you’d like to read The Entanglement with me, reach out. I have some big announcements coming about possible expansion of this community, and a book club is a likely element.
At Dealbook Summit, Elon Takes the SBF Seat.
In a nice bit of cosmic poetry, Elon Musk took the NYT Dealbook Summit stage yesterday across from Andrew Ross Sorkin – exactly where Sam Bankman-Fried was exactly one year ago. And Elon’s performance was just as delusional as Sam’s: at one point Elon averred that if Twitter/X went bankrupt and shut down, the public would lay blame on the advertisers boycotting him. “Let’s see what Earth thinks,” he said to Sorkin. In the same spirit, Musk also told Bob Iger of Disney to go fuck himself for pausing advertising.
I’m sure the employees over at X dot com are overjoyed. Basically, Musk talks about Twitter as a moral mission rather than a business, and appears to believe the general public cares MUCH more about Twitter than it actually does. So, he just like me fr.
Grok your Grok.
Supposedly Twitter/X’s new artificial intelligence tool, Grok, will launch this week for premium subscribers to the site. Since we’re talking about Elon Musk here, the probably means next March, but it’s still something to eagerly anticipate. Musk has become a hallucinating husk of a man, and is apparently die-hard committed to destroying his new toy with a kamikaze dedication to “free speech” (read: coming as close as possible to saying the 14 words). The Grok bot will supposedly be trained on raw Twitter data, which means it will be an utter raving psychopath. And I guarantee you Elon has little clue how much such a bot costs to run, or how that cost actually stacks up to revenue, so I bet you a million dollars Twitter will now be losing even more money.
Downtown Josh Brown.
One of the most entertaining and insightful commentators in finance, is calling an end to the Reformed Broker blog, because it helped him create a job he liked even more. “You may have noticed that in the last couple of years I have been writing a lot less here,” he says of the transition. “The main reason for that is all my professional dreams are coming true. I used to dream of working at a firm like the one I am now managing as CEO.”
Wildcat Finance.
The moderately anticipated new project from Laurence Day (@functi0nzer0, Euler Finance) is expected to launch some elements this week. Wildcat’s broad pitch is that it creates permissioned, risk-conscious, and most importantly undercollateralized borrow-lending facilities on Ethereum. (Whitepaper here.) It’s an arcane project for professionals, and seems particularly of interest to market makers or other liquidity providers.
Nikola Fraudster Trevor Milton To Be Sentenced
This is a blast from the past, and a personal one for me. The sentencing of Trevor Milton, founder and former CEO of fakakte electric truck company Nikola, has been delayed. But only slightly - the new sentencing date is reportedly December 11, 2023. Milton faces, inshallah, as much as 22 years in prison after being convicted on three fraud charges in October of 2022.
Way back in mid-2020 during my time at Fortune, I interviewed Milton about the absurd claims his company was making about breakthroughs in battery life. That turned out to be just one of his many lies. It was perfectly clear at the time that he was a bullshit artist, starting right from the copycat name of his company, but it was rolling a nonfunctional truck down a hill that really cooked his goose.
Nikola Motor went public in 202 via a SPAC, which Chamath Palihapitiya insists was DEFINITELY NOT a light-disclosure structure perfect for cashing out bullshit companies.
Anyway Nikola stock has lost 98.4% of its value since its post-SPAC peak. Trevor Milton is, reportedly, still a billionaire.
Kyber Exploiter Wants to Eat the Whole Meal
In possibly the wildest twist in a major blockchain exploit, the $50 million Kyber exploiter is now demanding control of the entire Kyber organization.
In a manifesto of sorts embedded in an Ethereum block early this morning U.S. time, the exploiter says they want “complete executive control over Kyber,” along with the handover of cryptographic voting control and “All documents and information related to the company/protocol formation.”
“Executives, you will be bought out of the company at a fair valuation. You will be wished well in your future endeavors,” the hacker sez. He bears those executives no ill will! “A small error was made, rounding in the wrong direction.” That’s a reference to what experts have called the incredibly nuanced nature of the attack itself (see below).
This is not being taken particularly seriously, since to be handed this kind of control the hacker would surely have to reveal their identity … then go straight to jail. A lot of speculation has swirled that it’s some sort of stalling tactic, but more likely, it’s just trolling for lulz. All of this follows the hacker’s complaints that his victims weren’t nice enough to him.
This emotionally sensitive hacker also thinks they’re Robin Hood! “Employees, under the new regime your salary will be doubled,” they promise. Presumably using stolen money? They even seem to have a business plan! Kyber “will no longer be the 7th most popular DEX, but an entirely new cryptographic project.” Okay.
As for the initial exploit, Doug Colkitt at Ambient Finance last week published the most nuanced description I’ve seen – and I can’t claim to entirely understand it myself.
