AI applications like OpenAI’s GPT series can now hold, send, and receive Bitcoin (BTC) using a suite of new tools unveiled by Lightning infrastructure firm Lightning Labs on Thursday. According to Lightning Labs, Bitcoin is the Internet’s native currency, and the company has built tools that integrate high-volume Bitcoin micropayments via Lightning with popular AI software libraries like LangChain. This will make software deployment cheaper and increase the depth of possible use cases for AI.
One interesting use case is the ability to create software that can charge for application programming interface (API) access. APIs allow different pieces of software to communicate, and a user can sell a prompt by gating access to an API capable of responding to queries. Michael Levin, who leads product growth at Lightning Labs, predicted that chatbots and their user interfaces (UIs) are only the beginning, and the most useful products won’t be chat UIs, but SaaS/Enterprise/API products built on LLMs to uniquely solve user problems.