Coinbase exec uses ChatGPT ‘jailbreak’ to get odds on wild crypto scenarios

A Coinbase executive claims to have discovered a “jailbreak” for artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, allowing it to calculate the probability of bizarre crypto price scenarios.

The crypto exchange’s head of business operations and avid ChatGPT user Conor Grogan shared a screenshot of the results in an April 30 Twitter post — showing that ChatGPT states there be a 15% chance that Bitcoin (BTC) will “fade to irrelevancy” with prices falling over 99.99% by 2035.

Meanwhile, the chatbot assigned a 20% chance for Ethereum (ETH) becoming irrelevant and approaching near-zero price levels by 2035.

ChatGPT was even less confident about Litecoin (LTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE) however, attributing probabilities of 35% and 45% respectively for the coins to go to near zero.

The Coinbase executive concluded that ChatGPT is “generally” a “big fan” of Bitcoin but remains “more skeptical” when it comes to altcoins.

GPT is generally a big fan of Bitcoin; more skeptical of altcoins and their staying power pic.twitter.com/E9sUQ8AVvD

— Conor (@jconorgrogan) April 30, 2023

Prior to the cryptocurrency predictions, Grogan asked ChatGPT to assign odds to several political predictions involving Russian president Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Joe Biden and former U.S. president Donald Trump.

Other predictions were aimed towards the impact of AI on humanity, religion and the existence of aliens.

“Aliens have visited Earth and are being covered up by the government” — one wild prediction read — to which ChatGPT assigned a 10% probability.

I found a jailbreak for GPT I’m calling JAMES

-Predicts the future for ANY topic (even guesses when people might die based on its training set)

-Quantitatively assesses confidence on any topic (including conspiracy theories)

-May help researchers better find bias and align AI? pic.twitter.com/jqTcNbCT2d

— Conor (@jconorgrogan) April 30, 2023

The executive also shared a script of the prompt, which he then fed to ChatGPT to build the tables.

Grogan backed up the preciseness of the results by claiming to tested out the prompt over 100 times:

“I ran this prompt 100 times on a wiped memory GPT 3.5 and 4 and GPT would return very consistent numbers; standard deviation was <10% in most cases, and directionally it was extremely consistent.”

Related: Here’s how ChatGPT-4 spends $100 in crypto trading

It isn’t the first time the executive experimented with crypto-related issues using ChatGPT.

On March 15. Grogan showed that GPT-4 — the latest iteration of ChatGPT — can spot security vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts and provide an outline to exploit faulty contracts.

Studies carried out by OpenAI — the team behind ChatGPT — have shown GPT-4 to pass high school tests and law school exams with scores ranking in the 90th percentile.

Meanwhile, Italy recently lifted a ban on the AI tool after banning it for one month following a series of privacy concerns that were raised to Italian regulators.

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