Solana rolls out ChatGPT plugin that integrates AI and Blockchain

Solana Labs on Tuesday announced the launch of its ChatGPT plugin. The firm claims that this product, available through a Github download, is the first layer 1 download to integrate blockchain with artificial intelligence (AI).

Solana’s chirping the announcement of the rollout quickly received more than 10,000 views and many retweets. The response is partly a reflection of growing interest – and alarm – at the pace of AI’s transformation of a number of functions in everyday life. Combine this rapid change with the cybersecurity risks of ChatGPT, and the picture becomes decidedly more complex.

Solana Labs emphasizes programmability

Anticipating the many questions consumers will have, the Solana Foundation published an in-depth interview with Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko on its website.

In his discussion with Jonathan Abramovich, Yakovenko described what he sees as the benefits of crypto application programming interfaces (APIs). Crypto APIs, he argued, are “much better” than APIs that handle transactions from centralized service providers.

“They lack trust and don’t deal with the same issues that centralized service providers have to deal with. They have more programmability, and therefore an AI that can deploy smart contracts and perform transactions is better and more powerful than one that cannot, Yakovenko said.

From this point of view, the ChatGPT plugin is useful, he claimed. It provides the user with a text interface that can identify and classify objects, Yakovenko said. Such as NFT accounts, he said.

“The ChatGPT plugin reads on-chain data that can help construct transactions that can be executed on-chain,” Yakovenko added.

He went on to express the hope that users will run such transactions in a ChatGPT loop. This requires a relatively inexpensive machine interface to the chain, he said.

Meta raises security concerns

Yakovenko did not discuss the serious security threats to ChatGPT raised in a recent report by Meta. Or how easily some hackers exploit vulnerabilities in ChatGPT to steal personal data and money.

The new plugin may aim to make ChatGPT synonymous with crypto for some users. But nowhere in the interview does Yakovenko acknowledge that for some it already is – in the worst possible sense.

A May 3 CNN story quoted Guy Rosen, chief information security officer at Meta, telling reporters how much ChatGPT lends itself to hacks.

“From a bad actor’s perspective, ChatGPT is the new crypto,” Rosen said. Bad actors are using malware to exploit the flaws in ChatGPT, he warned.

“Since March alone, the company said it has blocked the sharing of more than 1,000 malicious URLs that claimed to be linked to ChatGPT or related tools,” the article added.