Leveraging the unparalleled power of artificial intelligence against the unpredictable nature of the crypto market, the Perceptron is finally ready to run once again…
Hello Jeff. I really enjoy your deep analysis/research on the market and tech. Welcome back!
Are you planning to bring back the Crypto Trading service (I think it was called Perceptron) in the near future? If so, would you be able to tell us the timeline? Thanks.
– Jong C.
Welcome back, Jeff. You were most definitely missed. Neural Net Profits was fun. I know it was being executed in the middle of the crypto winter, but I really looked forward to trades in this service.
I would love to see Neural Net Profits return to action. Best Regards.
– Michael S.
Hi Jeff Team Brownstone. For a while, Brownstone had a Web 3 service but gave us something like a two-day warning before shutting it down. [Your analyst] had written a very in-depth description of how to set up one’s presence on the blockchain but the instructions disappeared when they closed that service.
I hope all that hard meticulous work will once again be posted! I’ve already said it but it can’t be stated enough: I’m over the moon with your return! You are an exceptional writer and make reading Fun and educational! Thanks for all you do!!
– Michael H.
I am very happy that you are back at the helm and I continue to really appreciate your and your team’s research. I eagerly await the return of the perceptron, particularly in view of the recent update regarding it.
It seems that Brownstone has more than put the recent turmoil behind it and has become better and stronger.
– St. Jon S.
Hello Jeff. It’s good to have you back. I wanted to ask about the crypto portfolio you had (Unchained Profits). Is retaking that portfolio on the cards as well? I think Crypto still holds a lot of potential.
And what about Neural net Profits? Perceptron had quite a good track record. Thanks for all your work…
– Miguel J.
Thank you all for the feedback and taking the time to write in. It’s great to see the incredible interest and excitement around the Perceptron and digital assets in general. We had so much feedback it would have been impossible to publish it all.
The Perceptron is back in full force. We’ve been working with it daily for months in preparation for its relaunch next Wednesday night.
This is a special project for me. I remember, many years ago, explaining to the company what it was I wanted to build. No one in the company had ever done something like this before.
It wasn’t easy, but I forged ahead, invested a lot, and built something that worked remarkably well in both bear markets and healthy markets. That performance gave me the confidence to invest even more, file a patent, and bring the Perceptron – and its associated trading service – back to life.
This is an exciting time in the blockchain industry. We’re seeing what I’d call normal, healthy market conditions in cryptocurrencies with quite a bit of volatility. This is a great environment for the Perceptron.
Venture capital investment in blockchain projects rose to $2.5 billion in the first quarter of this year. We’re seeing a rebound since the cool-off period during the second half of 2022 and into 2023.
The industry is also maturing, just as we would expect after a decade of development. The majority of the investment right now is in infrastructure, Web3, metaverse/gaming, NFTs, trading/exchanges, and lending.
This is still a high-growth industry in the early stages of adoption, which means there is far more upside and growth ahead for us to look forward to.
The Perceptron is the first step. It will give us access to short-term trading opportunities and we can take advantage of the volatility in the cryptocurrency markets.
I’ll get into more detail about the Perceptron at my event on Wednesday. You can go here to sign up. Please mark your calendar for September 25 at 8 p.m. ET.
The next step after that will be my buy-and-hold cryptocurrency investment research product. It used to be called Unchained Profits, but we should expect a new name as we rebuild and relaunch a similar service.
I have already brought an all-star analyst on board to partner with me on this product, and I can’t wait to launch that as well.
We’ll have a lot of catching up to do with that product. I’m very excited to get everyone up to speed on what’s happening in the world of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.
Hi, Jeff. Thanks for the update.
Perceptron sounds pretty good and I would like to get in on it, but without making a ton of trades. Have you considered making a pool of funds, or some other device, to let us invest in it passively? Perhaps we might be able to make a return on your profits maybe once a month or quarter. Have you considered anything like that?
As usual, I look forward to your regular updates.
– James D.M.
Hi James,
Thanks for this question. It’s a reasonable one, and I’ve been asked this from time to time.
Unfortunately, this is outside the scope of our business. It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s just that we won’t do it because of our charter. Our investment and trading services are structured to be conflict-free, unlike what we typically see on Wall Street.
We’re not a broker/dealer, we’re not a hedge fund or fund manager, and we’re not financial advisors. My team and I are specialists, analysts, and computer scientists who produce independent, conflict-free investment research and trading services.
The Perceptron will definitely be part of an active trading service and is designed for those who are interested in compounding their trading capital with more frequent gains over shorter periods.
It does take a bit more effort to actively trade, so it’s not for everyone, but we will try to make it easy by recommending cryptocurrencies that are easily accessible via top digital-asset exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken.
Again, you can go here to sign up to attend my Perceptron event to learn more about it.
However, if you’re certain an active trading service doesn’t align with your goals but still want a way to profit from the current crypto market, a better alternative for you will be my forthcoming buy-and-hold investment research product for cryptocurrencies.
Behind the scenes, my team and I are preparing to launch this service. We hope to have it out before the end of this year.
There’s a lot more to come.
Now, on to the AMA…
Jeff, you have a great outlook for the future use and benefits of AGI. It holds great promise for expanded knowledge, but I am curious if you think that AGI will ever equal the human mind when it comes to “thinking outside the box”?
– Carl R.
Hi Carl,
This is a heavy question as it speaks to the uncomfortable subject of whether or not we humans will have any advantage over an artificial general intelligence (AGI). Said another way, is there anything that we’ll be able to do that an AGI won’t be able to do?
Before we get to that, let’s tackle your specific question.
The answer is yes, an AGI will be capable of “thinking outside the box.” And I would argue our current generation of neural networks has already demonstrated the ability to do so.
Let’s take Alpha Go for example. Alpha Go was a neural network designed by DeepMind – a UK-based division of Alphabet – to play the game of Go. Go was a particularly interesting challenge for AI. The number of possible positions in a match of Go is greater than the number of atoms in the entire universe.
It’s a number too large to comprehend. And that’s the point. There isn’t enough computational power on Earth to be able to retain and analyze every possible position in a Go match. That means that AlphaGo had to excel at pattern recognition and “think” of ways to win.
Back in 2016, AlphaGo destroyed the world’s top Go master 4 games to 1. I’ve joked in the past that AlphaGo may have displayed sympathy and given Lee Sedol one game so he wouldn’t feel as bad. Sedol’s defeat was so great, he quit because “AI cannot be defeated.”
Again, that was eight years ago.
The same was true when DeepMind revealed AlphaFold in 2020. This was an AI capable of accurately predicting the protein structures of more than 200 million proteins.
DeepMind has since released AlphaFold 3 this May, capable of predicting the structure of all proteins, DNA, RNA, and ligands for all of life.
This wouldn’t have been possible without “thinking outside the box”… And a lot of computational power.
An easy way for us to think about this is that an AI, or an AGI, will be able to think outside the box by trying every possible combination, optimization, correlation, process, or technique possible.
It won’t discriminate, it won’t have bias, and it doesn’t have to worry about time. An AGI can try approaches to problem-solving that a human subject matter expert would think to be crazy and guaranteed to fail. The AGI won’t care and will try it anyway. It isn’t held back by the presumptions and limitations of consideration that humans are prone to.
With enough computational power, it can – and will – try everything to come up with the best solution. AlphaGo came up with gameplay unlike anything Lee Sedol had ever seen from a human player.
An AGI will be far more powerful.
One of the biggest human constraints is time. Subject matter experts, who may be well-versed in a specific area, tend to become heavily biased in what they believe will and won’t work.
They are anchored to what they know from years of study and practice, and they’re only an “expert” in their specific field of study. They have limited time and don’t have the luxury of trying everything.
So they make decisions on paths of research they believe have the highest probability of success.
An AGI won’t have that constraint. And its area of expertise won’t be limited to just one field of study. It will be better than a PhD-level scientist in many fields, like materials science, physics, mathematics, computer science, nuclear power, electrical engineering, etc… No human can be an expert in so many fields.
This is precisely the reason I spend so much time in deep study on so many fields. Doing so enables me to see correlations and connections that those who only study in one field wouldn’t see. And AGI can do this at a far greater scale.
AGI technology will be the ultimate in human augmentation. While AGI will be capable of self-directed research, we will be part of that process. We will not only provide the direction and prioritization of the use of this technology, but we’ll also be responsible for the employment of the output of the technology into society.
AGI technology will help enhance our out-of-the-box thinking to a degree that hasn’t been possible before. And that’s precisely why we’re on the cusp of a radical technological acceleration.
Hi Jeff,
I have a question for you. I keep seeing accidents and close calls at our country’s airports and hear about short staffing problems as well.What would it take to create, train up, and implement an AI system that could monitor, communicate with ground and air flights, and make changes to avoid accidents? Is anything like that in development? Thanks!
– Marji S.
Hi Marji,
This is a sensitive question, though it shouldn’t be.
To your point, there is a large labor shortage problem in air traffic control. The Department of Transportation identified that 77% of critical air traffic control facilities in the U.S. are understaffed. But it’s actually worse than that.
At the end of last year, there was a scathing piece written in the New York Times highlighting problems with drugs, alcohol, distracted air traffic controllers, and exhaustion, among other things, in the industry. And the industry is still short about 3,000 air traffic controllers. That should make all of us who fly regularly very uncomfortable.
Something has to change. The risks are simply too high. And it is clearly an area where AI could be of great help.
Fortunately, there are already some efforts underway.
A team of researchers at Arizona State University have already developed an AI-based software program called PARAATM (Prognostic Analysis and Reliability Assessment for Air Traffic Management). How’s that for a name?
The team uses data from NASA, as well as radar and GPS signaling data to “see” aircraft from 200 miles away from their destination to begin the process of air traffic control and early identification of any issues between aircraft in flight.
In the U.K., the government has funded Project Bluebird, which is a partnership between publicly traded NATS and The Alan Turning Institute. Bluebird is an effort to use AI to augment air traffic controllers in their jobs to safely control air traffic.
There will be great reluctance and resistance to just handing over control of airspace to an AI, despite the issues related to human air traffic controllers. That’s why I believe the most likely outcome will be to employ the technology to augment human air traffic controllers.
An AI could easily monitor and control to ensure everything is in order and highlight potential issues that will require human decision-making.
We might think of this as a filter. The AI will manage the mundane, ordinary operations, and the human will step in to address the important ones. This would go a long way to addressing the labor shortages and will also reduce the workload for human controllers.
This is a long time coming in an industry that hasn’t changed much in decades. And as we employ this technology, the skies will definitely get even safer as a result.
I was wondering who is the current leader in the development of a quantum computer. I can’t think of any technology that will change our lives as this will.
– Jeffrey B.
Hi Jeffrey,
There are a lot of companies, both public and private, working on quantum computing technology. Some of the largest players are Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Honeywell (HON), IBM (IBM), D-Wave (QBTS), IonQ (IONQ), Rigetti (RGTI), PsiQuantum, Zanadu, Quantinuum, and SandboxAQ.
We can think of quantum computers as yet another computing platform upon which to run technology like machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Quantum computers are extremely complex and most require very controlled environments to operate. Quantum computing today is still very “noisy.” Quantum computers struggle to maintain coherence and tend to run for only split seconds before errors overwhelm the system. This improves every year.
It’s still very early days in quantum computing, but we’re going to see some major improvements over the next couple of years.
From an investment perspective, quantum computing revenues are very small in the larger companies above, so there is very little investment exposure when investing in those companies for quantum computing.
We can get great leverage in the smaller companies that are doing impressive work. But right now, in a high-interest-rate environment, small-capitalization stocks that are not generating free cash flow are out of favor.
The Federal Reserve just pulled down the Fed Funds rate by 50 basis points, but interest rates are still high. We’re going to have to see some further movement lower before we start to see institutional capital rotate more heavily into small-capitalization tech and biotech stocks.
Once that happens, this will be an exciting space and something that I’ll be covering in Exponential Tech Investor.
You are confusing “intelligence” with “knowledge”! Of course an AI will have more knowledge than any PhD, but can it think creatively and rationally?
No, these language models with which AIs are trained do nothing more than train them to operate as the vast majority of humans (from which the training info was taken) do. And the mess of current civilization should tell us how bad is that thinking.
– Paul W.
Hi Paul,
I touched quite a bit on your question with my reply to Carl, so please have a read of that response for more perspective.
You are spot on with your point about the models doing what they are trained to do, and that they are trained on the data that humans give them.
If we point an AI in the wrong direction, or if we give an AI training data that is factually incorrect, the results will be wrong/bad. Garbage in, garbage out of course.
But the point I made earlier is that artificial general intelligence will be capable of self-directed research. It will be capable of exploring ideas, possibilities, and connections outside the reach of even the smartest teams of human “experts” in any field.
AGIs will be able to discover new knowledge and think creatively (outside the box), and more rationally than humans do. Human “experts” are notorious for having bias. Many are politically motivated. And all of them have human emotions.
One great advantage of an AI, or AGI, is that it can operate without bias and emotion, assuming it’s trained without bias. Its only goal to is discover, optimize, and solve for an assigned problem set. That’s it. Devoid of emotion, just one goal in mind.
AI has already become a remarkable tool for augmenting human labor, research, and development. And hopefully, to your point, we will learn to use this incredible technology to create a world of abundance and get out of the mess we currently find ourselves in.
OK, that’s a wrap for the week.
Best wishes for a wonderful weekend.
Jeff
Editor’s Note: Don’t forget to go here to sign up for Jeff’s Perceptron launch event on Wednesday, September 25, at 8 p.m. ET.
He’ll dive deep into how the Perceptron works and discuss the three crypto opportunities it’s flashing a buy signal on right now…
He’ll even give away the name of one crypto the Perceptron has flagged, completely free. You can sign up to attend right here.
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The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
