Thread by @balajis

Blockchains are much easier to search index than the open web, which is in turn easier than closed social networks.

And GPT-3 can generate better-than-search results on the fly.

So, it sounds cliche, but “blockchain and AI” really are a long-term pincer attack on Google Search.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1368610223708008451

Why are blockchains easier to index than the web? They have a single canonical endpoint & all records are in the same format. Just need to keep chain tip fresh.

Far easier than crawling the menagerie of web pages.

Which is in turn easier than getting full Twitter API access!

Why can GPT-3 (or sequels) generate better-than-search results?

It also takes a search index as input (Common Crawl), but it doesn’t just present you 10 blue links.

It does the synthesis for you, and may eventually be able to do it offline just with learned parameters.

Block explorers are search engines for blockchains, but with crypto oracles they are gradually scaling to index more content than just financial transactions.

Might be interesting for @OneMorePeter or @Nikilster to see if GPT-3-inspired techniques can improve block explorers.

To prove that blockchains are easier to index than the web, which is in turn easier than social, compare:

- block explorer
- basic web search engine
- Twitter search engine

Downloading a blockchain is a subroutine. Crawling the web is hard. Getting Twitter data is ~impossible.