Solana Rolls Out ChatGPT Plugin Integrating AI and Blockchain

Solana Labs announced on Tuesday the release 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 tweet announcing the rollout quickly racked up more than 10,000 views and numerous retweets. The response is partly a reflection of growing interest – and alarm – at the pace of AI’s transformation of numerous features of everyday life. Combine this rapid change with the cybersecurity risks of ChatGPT, and the picture grows decidedly more complex.

Solana Labs Stresses Programmability

As if in anticipation of the many questions that consumers will have, Solana Foundation published an in-depth interview with Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko on its home page.

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 “way better” than APIs that handle transactions on the part of centralized service providers.

“They are trustless and don’t deal with the same issues that centralized service providers have to deal with. They have more programmability and so an AI that can deploy smart contracts and do transactions is better and more powerful than one that can’t,” Yakovenko said.

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

“ChatGPT plugin is reading on-chain data that can help construct transactions that can be run on-chain,” Yakovenko added.

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

Meta Raises Security Issues

Yakovenko did not discuss the serious security threats to ChatGPT raised in a recent report from Meta. Or the ease with which 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 flaws in ChatGPT, he warned.

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