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Bitcoin Going to $140K Says Trio of AIs Managing $30M Investment Fund

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There’s a $30 million fund that, for all intents and purposes, leaves all investment decisions to be made by artificial intelligence (AI).

The firm’s name: Intelligent Alpha. Its staff includes founder and CEO Doug Clinton, a few programmers and contractors, and a trio of AIs — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.

The AI triumvirate makes up the firm’s investment committee and so far, it’s doing a stellar job.

“Some of the AI’s best calls have been shorts,” Clinton told CoinDesk in an interview. “It was short on Boeing earlier this year, before that door blew off the 737 MAX [in January]. And AI was actually short on the stock for that reason — because it thought there would be quality issues with the plane.”

While the firm has focused on traditional finance so far and mostly kept away from crypto, Clinton said he started experimenting with bitcoin (BTC) specifically in the last five months. The objective: for AI to set useful targets to trade the world’s top cryptocurrency.

“In the bull case — which was a Trump win and a more favorable regulatory environment — AI saw that bitcoin could maybe go to $140,000,” Clinton said. “Maybe that’s the scenario we’re working toward right now.”

How it works

A lot of firms now use AI to enhance human processes, to help analysts process data and think in different ways. But Clinton’s method is to give responsibility to the AI trio, and stay out of its way as much as possible when it comes to investment decisions.

The process is relatively simple. If, for example, Intelligent Alpha is looking to build a large cap U.S. equity portfolio, the fund will curate a bunch of data about U.S. companies with large market capitalizations, like historical revenue and earning projections, and feed it to the AIs.

The next step is to give a philosophical framework for the AIs to use. Clinton asks the AIs to step into the shoes of some of the most famous investors in the world — Warren Buffett, Stanley Druckenmiller, Cathie Wood — and apply their way of thinking to the portfolio at hand.

The triumvirate then produces a portfolio, which a human must double-check to make sure there aren’t any “hallucinations,” in Clinton’s words. For example, the AI may accidentally include a stock that was recently acquired, or the stock of a company with a small market cap.

“Other than that, we try not to really mess with the portfolios,” Clinton told CoinDesk. “As a human, I’ll sometimes look at the portfolios and think ‘Oh, this pick seems like a terrible idea.’ Other times I’ll see something really interesting and try to understand the logic. It’s kind of fun.”

The process involves the three AIs explaining their reasoning to Clinton. Not only does it help him ascertain that the investments are aligned with the portfolio’s goals, but he says that models provide better portfolios when they’re forced to explain why they like specific stocks.

It often happens for the AIs to disagree. And their way of thinking changes as updates get rolled out. “It used to be the case that Claude was the most contrarian model in terms of the outputs, when we first started testing,” Clinton said. “Now I would say it’s ChatGPT.” And while Clinton has tested other AIs such as Grok or Lama AI, keeping the investment committee down to three AIs has proved to be the most efficient set-up.

Predicting the future

Investors can gain exposure to Intelligent Alpha’s strategy through an exchange-traded fund, the Intelligent Livermore ETF, which launched in September and uses AI to build a global equity portfolio. More such funds are on the way, Clinton said.

For the Livermore ETF, every financial quarter the models review world events and try to make predictions for the next three to six months. Five or six areas of opportunities are then identified (following the investment philosophies of the greats like Druckenmiller) and the portfolio gets built around these sectors.

Having competing philosophies means the portfolio usually ends up being quite balanced. “In many cases they’re looking at idiosyncratic opportunities,” Clinton said. “We haven’t seen big issues where [the investment philosophies] are at odds, but even then, it would be like hedging.” The AIs themselves make the decisions on how to weigh the various philosophies found in the portfolio, depending on the areas they’re the most confident in.

“AI has been, at least so far, really good at seeing forward,” Clinton said. “Right before we launched, it made a big bet on Asian stocks, specifically Chinese stocks, and that was right before [billionaire hedge fund manager] David Tepper went on CNBC in September and said that China was his biggest bet, that they were bringing out the bazooka for stimulus. And you know, Chinese stocks went crazy.”

Another memorable trade: chipmaker giant Nvidia has been AI’s top pick since the experiment began in summer of 2023. “Back then, I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Nvidia had run so much at that point,” Clinton said. “But it’s up now like 400% from the moment the AI picked it.” The lesson in there, he says, is humans will react to charts emotionally, whereas AI “just doesn’t care. It says ‘No, this is going to go higher.’”

Not that every bet has been a slam dunk, but so far, the mistakes have been on the margin, according to Clinton. The AI is building a good track record on macro events especially, he said. For one thing, it predicted that former President Donald Trump would be re-elected.

And crypto?

One of the reasons Intelligent Alpha doesn’t focus too much on crypto is simply lack of data. Their trades may have happened on-chain, but there’s no easy way to go back and find the kind of trading setups and investment philosophies used by famous crypto investors like Cobie or GCR. Most of the time, all you can do is go off of their posts on X — and it’s hard to know whether the posts reflect reality.

That being said, the crypto community’s reliance on X means that Grok could end up playing a role in Intelligent Alpha’s triumvirate someday for crypto purposes, Clinton mused, since that model is trained and fine-tuned with data from the social media platform.

“The question that we’re exploring here is, what can we do with AI that would maybe be unique and different and stand out a little bit,” Clinton said. “To find a unique way to use AI to identify breakout crypto projects, that would be a really cool way to use the tech.”

John Gierach, Fly Fishing Author With Wit and Wisdom, Dies at 77

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John Gierach, a fly fisherman who was as skilled with a rod and reel as he was with words, producing hundreds of articles and more than 20 books, including “Even Brook Trout Get the Blues” and “Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing,” died on Oct. 3 in Longmont, Colo. He was 77.

His wife, Susan de Castro Gierach, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by cardiac arrest.

Avuncular and white-whiskered, Mr. Gierach celebrated the everyday foibles and frustrations that make up the fly-fishing life, as well as the occasional triumph over an aggravating trout.

In a sport often considered a pastime for the well-to-do, he spoke to fly fishing’s everyman appeal. He was, as one of his book titles suggested, a “trout bum.” The expensive outfitters, private rivers and $700-a-day guides? Not for him. To have a good day in the stream, all he needed was a decent rod, the right fly and a strong cup of coffee.

When he began writing, in the 1970s, the voluminous literature around fly fishing tended to the self-serious, reverent and snobbish. Mr. Gierach brought something different: humor, irony and self-awareness.

“Trout are wonderfully hydrodynamic creatures who can dart and hover in currents in which we humans have trouble just keeping our footing,” he wrote in “Trout Bum” (1986), his third book. “They are torpedo shaped, designed for moving water, and behave like eyewitnesses say U.F.O.s do.”

Although he wrote the occasional technical article or book, most of his work was reflective, experiential and broadly accessible. He was an inveterate storyteller; many of his best articles seem at first to be rangy shaggy-dog tales about a recent fishing trip, only to reveal, upon further examination, a piquant life lesson poking through the fish tales.

Optimism Foundation Agreed to Give Kraken $42.5M of OP Tokens in Layer-2 Deal

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Kraken, a major U.S. crypto exchange, shared last week that it would launch a layer-2 called Ink, relying upon the Optimism’s blockchain ecosystem’s OP Stack framework – and become part of the fast-growing “Superchain” that also includes layer-2 networks from the crypto exchange Coinbase along with the electronics giant Sony and decentralized exchange Uniswap.

But there was a price: Both projects have confirmed to CoinDesk that the Optimism Foundation agreed to provide grants to Kraken in the amount of 25 million OP tokens – worth roughly $100 million earlier this year, when the deal was struck, and now valued at about $42.5 million.

The deal, which was finalized around January or February, paved the way for Kraken to use Optimism’s OP Stack, a customizable toolkit that lets users create their own layer-2 rollups based on Optimism’s technology.

Kraken clarified with CoinDesk that under the deal, the token allocation would be paid to Kraken in grants over a time period. On Jan. 1 , the OP token was worth $3.99, according to CoinGecko, reaching a high of $4.06 on Feb. 20 during that time period. It now trades around $1.70.

The Optimism Foundation confirmed the number of tokens involved in the deal and declined to comment further.”

According to Andrew Koller, founder of Ink, the number is similar to various other deals that are part of the Superchain ecosystem.

“And it was actually Optimism that proposed that number first, and it was very in line with what other Superchain participants have gotten,” Koller told CoinDesk in an interview.

Optimism’s growth

Layer-2 networks have been popping up all over the Ethereum ecosystem over the past year. Crypto exchange Coinbase famously launched their Base layer-2 network in August of 2023 with OP Stack. Since then, decentralized exchange Uniswap shared that it would launch a layer-2 on OP Stack called Unichain, and electronics giant Sony shared it was also coming out with a layer-2 called Soneium based on Optimism’s technology.

AI pioneer Sam Altman’s blockchain project, World, known for its controversial iris-scanning orbs, went live with its layer-2 Worldchain in August, also built on OP Stack.

“I think for some of the big partners that really sign in and do this, this massive commitment that, again, we are spending our money and resources to be able to contribute to the Superchain, of which is not something that, you know, we built, and we’re technically making money on, you know, like the actual open source repos,” Kroller added.

According to Koller, the grant with OP Labs is based on transactions per month, “each time you achieve one, then there’s different tranches that get unlocked, and there’s an initial unlock, and then the rest gets unlocked at each month.”

Base has a slightly different setup, being one of the first in the space under this program. Base disclosed in a blog post in August 2023 that it would receive up to 2.75% of the OP token supply over a six-year period. The total supply of OP tokens is currently close to 4.3 billion, which makes Base eligible to receive up to 118 million OP tokens.

For newer layer-2s in the Superchain, “it’s just like a time-lock thing. And after them [Base], I think all Superchain participants are really driving that around activity,” Koller said.

Paid deals

Deals between layer-2 projects and big firms are not unheard of in the blockchain industry. In 2022, Polygon paid Starbucks $4 million in grants to build an NFT-powered loyalty program. The program was shuttered 18 months later.

At the time of the Starbucks deal, Polygon was led by Ryan Wyatt, who was ousted in 2023, according to a CoinDesk report. Wyatt joined the Optimism Foundation in November 2023, where he is the chief growth officer, in charge of onboarding more developers to build across the Optimism ecosystem.

“There’s no blueprints of this stuff, so you’re gonna make good decisions and bad decisions in this space. There’s not a lot you can lend at,” Wyatt told CoinDesk in an interview this week, conducted before CoinDesk learned about the Kraken deal.

Read more: Kraken Picks Optimism for New Layer-2 Network, Joining Coinbase’s Base on ‘Superchain’

Why I Changed My Birth Certificate 25 Years After I Transitioned

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My wife was the one who told me that the birth certificate for Baby Girl Boylan had finally arrived in the mail in late summer. It had been a long time coming — 66 years, in fact — because Baby Girl Boylan, of course, was me.

When I transitioned nearly 25 years ago, changing my birth certificate didn’t seem necessary: I’d been able to have all my other vital records altered, from my driver’s license to my Social Security card, without that step.

I’d also declined to get my birth certificate changed because it seemed like a rewriting of the historical record. To all of the onlookers on the day I arrived — my parents, the labor and delivery nurses at Bryn Mawr Hospital — the child they delivered appeared to be male. Everything else came later, as I gained consciousness, and clarity, about who I really was.

When I thought about it (if I thought about it), I wondered what a birth certificate is for. Is it a living document that can be amended in years to come, like the Constitution, as the person it belongs to gains agency and insight? Or is it a simple statement of long-past fact — like whether, on the day I was born, it was hot or cold?

But the threat of a second Trump presidency means that having my birth certificate reflect present reality has turned into a matter of grave importance. Quite frankly, whatever is on that document may in the not so distant future determine whether one can live one’s life in peace.

In the years since my transition, many states have formalized processes by which the gender on one’s birth certificate may be changed — while others have enacted laws to make such changes impossible. In August the Texas Department of State Health Services imposed a policy that blocks transgender people from making the change, even if they have a court order allowing them to do so. It was yet another salvo in the fight against trans rights and lives, an ongoing effort to render us invisible and to make our lives as difficult as possible.

For Trump and Harris, the Media Future Is Now

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In 2015, Barack Obama submitted to interviews with three YouTube stars, one of whom was notable for eating cereal out of a bathtub. It was a moment that opened a window into the media landscape of the future, after the mainstream media as we have known it — while also making that future seem basically absurd.

A year later Donald Trump won the White House, and there was a rush to find the sources of his victory in the darker reaches of the internet, in misinformation factories and troll farms. It was another window into the media future — but this time the future seemed dystopian, a realm of propaganda and manipulation.

In 2024, the media future doesn’t need to be seen through a glass darkly: For the younger generation of news consumers, it has basically arrived. But it isn’t embodied by cereal-eating YouTubers, Russian-funded disinformation operations or even the Silicon Valley-enforced progressive censorship that many conservatives feared four years ago.

Instead it’s embodied by the sex-and-relationships podcaster and the bro comedians who scored important interviews with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump this month — with the host of “Call Her Daddy,” Alex Cooper, tossing Harris questions about abortion and student loans, while the comics Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh chatted with Trump about his nicknaming strategy on their show, “Flagrant.”

As a conservative with an interest in moral decline, I was familiar with “Call Her Daddy,” but I confess I had never heard of “Flagrant” before clips from the Trump interview started populating my social media feed. Which is par for the course for this campaign: The nominees and their running mates have consistently submitted to interviews with shows and personalities who were barely on my radar screen.

There’s an impulse to interpret these media arrivistes as reinventions of the prior media dispensation — to cast a big podcaster like Joe Rogan as a muscled Walter Cronkite for the online age, or to frame appearances on “Call Her Daddy” and “Flagrant” as base mobilization operations, akin to appearing on “The Rachel Maddow Show” or “Hannity.”

Allan Blye, 87, Dies; ‘Smothers Brothers’ Writer and ‘Super Dave’ Creator

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Allan Blye, a television comedy writer and producer who helped cement the Smothers Brothers’ reputation for irreverence in the late 1960s and later collaborated with Bob Einstein to create the hapless daredevil character Super Dave Osborne, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 87.

His wife, Rita Blye, confirmed the death. She said he had been in hospice care for Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Blye was a writer and singer on variety shows in Canada when he received a surprise call in 1967 from Tom Smothers asking him to join the writing staff of the series that he and his and his brother, Dick, would be hosting on CBS.

“I couldn’t believe it was Tom Smothers,” Mr. Blye said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2019. “I thought it was Rich Little doing an impression of Tom Smothers.”

Tom, left, and Dick Smothers on the set of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967. Mr. Blye helped establish the show’s outspoken tone. Credit…CBS, via Getty Images

“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” was unlike any other variety show. The brothers were renowned as a comical folk-singing duo: Tom played the naïve, guitar-playing buffoon, and Dick, who played the double bass, was the wise straight man. They had creative control of the series, which emboldened them and their writers to be more outspoken as they addressed politics, the Vietnam War, religion and civil rights — and their forthrightness during a divisive era increasingly angered some viewers, CBS censors, some of the network’s affiliates and conservative groups.

Kim Jones Leaving Fendi

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The tectonic plates of the fashion world are shifting once again.

On Friday, LVMH confirmed that Kim Jones would be stepping down from his post as women’s wear designer at Fendi after four years, but that he would remain as artistic director of Dior men’s wear, a job he has held since 2018.

The news comes just over a week after LVMH, the world’s largest luxury group, announced that Hedi Slimane would be leaving Celine and would be replaced by Michael Rider. News that itself came after LVMH’s decision to sell Off-White, the brand founded by Virgil Abloh, to the American firm Bluestar Alliance, the owner of brands like Limited Too; buy the celebrity magazine Paris Match; and sign a 10-year deal with Formula One.

The Fendi announcement provides resolution to at least one of the maelstrom of rumors that have been swirling around the fashion world all summer, roiling the industry to such an extent that they practically overshadowed the clothes during the recent round of ready-to-wear shows.

For seasons, whispers had held that Mr. Jones was not long for Fendi, creating a cloud of doubt that hung over the brand no matter what was actually going on. And despite the against-the-odds nature of the task Mr. Jones had been given.

A celebrated men’s wear designer whose work for Dior — and Vuitton before that — had been transformative for both brands, Mr. Jones had never done women’s wear before taking on Fendi. And he wasn’t just trying his hand at a new discipline; he was splitting his time (and mind) between two different houses and stepping into the footsteps of Karl Lagerfeld, the mythic designer who had transformed both Fendi, where he worked for 54 years, and Chanel. Even if Mr. Lagerfeld’s work for Fendi was less definitive than his work for Chanel — other than creating the concept of “fun fur,” he had never really established a recognizable identity for the brand —, his profile was so high it obscured the creative confusion.

Looks from Mr. Jones’s spring 2023 Dior men’s collection.Credit…Yannis Vlamos
Credit…Yannis Vlamos

Salman Rushdie Will Testify at Trial of Man Accused of Stabbing Him

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The author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed and blinded in one eye two years ago by an attacker who rushed him onstage in front of hundreds of people, will testify at the man’s trial, prosecutors said on Friday.

The assailant, Hadi Matar, is charged with second-degree attempted murder and assault with a weapon in connection with the August 2022 attack, in Chautauqua County, in western New York. Prosecutors say the attack, during which Mr. Rushdie was stabbed about 10 times, was premeditated. Mr. Matar has pleaded not guilty.

The trial, which could last up to seven weeks, had been scheduled to begin on Tuesday. But on Friday, a state appeals court judge granted a defense request to delay the trial while the court considers a separate defense motion to move it out of Chautauqua County.

Nathaniel Barone, a public defender who is representing Mr. Matar, said it was important that the proceedings be moved “to preserve my client’s right to a fair trial,” which, he added, was impossible in Chautauqua County because of the publicity surrounding the case and the lack of a local Arab American community.

Mr. Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran ordered Muslims to kill the author following the 1988 publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” will most likely testify during the first two days of the prosecution’s case, officials said on Friday. He is one of about 15 witnesses who are expected to testify, officials said.

Mr. Matar also faces federal terrorism charges, including providing “material support and resources” to Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. He and his family moved from Lebanon to the United States when he was a child. He was living in New Jersey and working at a clothing store at the time of the attack.

‘Pod Save America’ Won’t Quit

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It was past midnight on June 28, and four podcast hosts were wide awake in a hotel suite in Boston.

Hours earlier, Democrats around the nation had gone to bed stunned after President Biden fumbled through his debate against former President Donald J. Trump. Crowded around a table in a dimly lit room, the four men, hosts of the popular podcast “Pod Save America,” were trying to process what they had just seen — not only for themselves but also for their millions of listeners.

“It would be silly not to have this conversation,” one of the show’s hosts, Jon Favreau, said on the recording.

“A Brutally Honest Debate Recap,” the 892nd episode of the seven-year-old political podcast hosted by four former Obama administration officials, was a turning point in what Democrats were willing to say about Mr. Biden’s chances in the 2024 race.

For months, the hosts had acknowledged polling and reporting that showed Mr. Biden’s age was a sticking point for voters. Last year on the show, they hosted Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman who had wanted to challenge Mr. Biden for the Democratic nomination largely because of concerns about his age.

But like most mainstream, high-profile Democrats, the men of “Pod Save America” had stopped well short of suggesting Mr. Biden should step aside.

Before the post-debate episode aired, anyone discussing the possibility of replacing Mr. Biden was seen as a “bad Democrat,” said Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist who has been a guest on one of the hosts’ spinoff podcast, “Pollercoaster.” But coming from “Pod Save America,” the case for a new candidate wasn’t so easily dismissed.

Evan Gershkovich, U.S. Journalist Imprisoned in Russia, Will Publish a Memoir

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Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was imprisoned in Russia for more than a year, is writing a memoir about his time in prison, his five years living in Moscow and Russia’s slide toward autocracy.

The memoir will be published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House, with a tentative publication date in 2026.

Paul Whitlatch, the editorial director for Crown, called the book “a testament to human resilience and a work of first-person reportage with few precedents in modern times.”

His statement continued, “During those sixteen months in Russian prisons, he never stopped being a reporter, even as he faced a reality few of us can imagine.”

Mr. Gershkovich, 32, was detained in March 2023 while on a reporting trip, becoming the first American journalist arrested in Russia on a spying charge since the end of the Cold War. His detention marked an escalation in President Vladimir V. Putin’s crackdown on independent media in Russia.

The Russian authorities accused Mr. Gershkovich, who had reported on Russia for The Journal since 2022, of being a spy for the U.S. government. The charges were vehemently denied by the White House, Mr. Gershkovich and The Journal, which said he was an accredited journalist doing his job. The U.S. government designated him as “wrongfully detained.”

Mr. Gershkovich was held in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, where he spent 23 hours a day inside a small cell and communicated with his family and friends through letters.

After a closed-door trial on the fabricated espionage charges, Mr. Gershkovich was sentenced in July to 16 years in a high-security penal colony.

He was freed on Aug. 1 as part of a sweeping prisoner swap that involved seven countries and led to the release of 15 people imprisoned in Russia.

Mr. Gershkovich is the son of Soviet émigrés, Mikhail Gershkovich and Ella Milman, who both left the country in 1979 for the United States. They raised their children in New Jersey, speaking Russian at home and instilling in them an appreciation for their Russian heritage.

Mr. Gershkovich, who previously worked for The New York Times as a news assistant, moved to Russia in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times, later joining The Wall Street Journal as a foreign correspondent.

In addition to Crown, the memoir has been sold to the publishing house William Collins in Britain, and to Meulenhoff, a publisher in the Netherlands, according to Mr. Gershkovich’s agent, Adam Eaglin.

“Evan is an extraordinary journalist and writer,” Mr. Eaglin said. “He will offer a powerful new perspective on Russia and its relationship to the West in the 21st century.”