“It’s good at answering Bitcoin- and economics-related questions — at least better than GPT-4,” Aleksandar Svetski told Cointelegraph at a bustling Bitcoin Amsterdam.
The entrepreneur, author and founder of Spirit of Satoshi, a novel artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM), begins to unpack the arduous journey his small startup has undertaken to create its Bitcoin-centric AI chatbot.
The model is the result of a time-consuming training process to generate responses based on reputable Bitcoin resources, the Austrian school of economics and libertarian ideals. Still in its infancy, Spirit of Satoshi reflects ideals from a “well-curated Bitcoin corpus,” including resources such as Saifedean Ammous’ best-seller The Bitcoin Standard.
Spirit of Satoshi’s dashboard is reminiscent of ChatGPT, while its outputs invoke a Bitcoin-centric theme. Source: Spirit of Satoshi
Svetski explained that the major difficulty in building the model was not just curating relevant sources of information from books, research papers and podcasts but also guiding the model to generate responses through an exhaustive training process. He added that a common misconception about LLMs is that they’re sourcing information like a search engine:
“They are just probabilistically stringing words together in a way that is representative of the patterns within the model. So, it’s not even sourcing anything.”
It’s part of the reason why AI chatbots tend to “hallucinate” from time to time, Svetski explained, and why developing an LLM requires a focus on training it on a style of answering. Spirit of Satoshi is by no means perfect either, at least not in its current iteration.
“Our model will also hallucinate. It’s also going to talk shit, but it’s going to say something more like a Bitcoiner would say.”
Having established a broad but targeted base of Bitcoin-centric information and data, Svetski’s team has set about feeding the model tens of thousands of question-and-answer pairs using programmatic methods. However, a human element is still required to help Spirit of Satoshi generate responses that…
..
