Gitcoin

🔥 New Gitcoin site just dropped Why? The funding landscape is fragmented. Lessons aren't being shared. Experiments are happening in isolation. So we built a living reference: the tools, the teams, the research, the results. All in one place. Turning hard-won experience into something everyone can use → gitcoin.co Here's what's on it 👇🧵

@amperlycom 🤝

@gitcoin the data rights conversation was abstract until the subscription landed on the desk of the developer whose code trained the model. now it is a bill

You’ve spent 15 years contributing open source code. Now, to stay employable, you rent your capability back from companies that trained their models on your work. Just so you can keep pace. This week, Anthropic shipped Opus 4.8 alongside workflows that can run hundreds of agents in parallel. They can write, refactor, and debug across entire codebases – because they were trained on ours. The commons became the input. The API became the gate. And the people who laid the foundation are now being forced to subscribe.

@preegee quickly, if nothing else 🫥

@gitcoin That's their plan and things are going along nicely in that direction

@Yeshua_tree yes 💔

@gitcoin The subtle part is the danger. AI can help us find words, but if it keeps us from sitting in the shame, grief, or repair long enough to become honest, we lose something human.

We ask Claude to draft apologies before we've internalized what we've done wrong. We ask ChatGPT to edit our emotions into a response that protects us from being known. Someone asks us a question, and our first instinct is to ask Gemini to answer for us. We used to hold human problems in our heads for hours, days, years – but now we offload them in minutes to intelligence that doesn't feel. It's not that AI is inherently bad, it's that the dependency curve is subtle – and what we're starting to outsource to machines is the intricate work of knowing who we are. We need to build a different path. 💚

@TheDefipi_Mad our mission 🫡💚

@gitcoin Well said gitcoin you need to fund real authentic projects and builders and I am one of them😊😊

Our phones know where we sleep, what we search for at 2am, and who we stop talking to. We're forced to subscribe to our toothbrushes. Our lawnmowers. Our refrigerators. Our cars. Our feeds know our anxieties, our preferences, and our deepest convictions. And all of this data – this intimate record of our lived experiences – somehow doesn’t even belong to us. Worse: it isn’t being used to make our lives better. It’s being used to make someone else richer at our expense. We need tech that protects us as aggressively as today’s platforms extract from us. And those builders need funding. 💚

@orbit_db 👀💚

@gitcoin Our p2p open source database arms developers with the tools necessary to store data with the original creator.

@Kenji_YP funding solutions that make data extraction impossible by design 🫡

@gitcoin so the solution is more funding for builders who will... also extract our data? kaka 😁😁

100%. if the incentive model still depends on profiling people to sell ads, it’s privacy theater. protecting aggressively might look like building tools where extraction's blocked by design. if the architecture can't collect your data, nobody can monetize it. things like privacy and data sovereignty can’t just be features, they need to be the business model.

@gitcoin curious what protecting as aggressively looks like in practice. feels like half the privacy projects i've seen just wrap ads differently

AI isn't replacing jobs one at a time, it’s collapsing the apprenticeship layer. Associate research. Junior design. Baseline code. Entry-level analysis. The first rungs of entire career ladders are being erased – while politicians package it into campaign language and CEOs translate it into margin. But people don’t need abstractions after their world's been pulled out from under them. They need a bridge. 💚

Banks are saying it plainly: adapt, or be replaced as "lower-value human capital." This is what it looks like when the social contract dissolves. The response has to be bigger than policy. Regulation alone can’t fix a logic that sees people as diminishing returns. We need to rebuild the system – so technology serves the public, and people remain the point. 💚

Meta cut 8,000 jobs today. More than 140,000 tech workers laid off this year. And it's only May. Meanwhile: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are projected to spend $725B on AI infrastructure this year. The money isn’t gone. It moved. From payroll to compute. From people to GPUs. So where does the talent go? Not the executives with runway. The engineers, designers, and researchers being replaced by the very systems they brought to life. They still have skills. They still want to build. What they don’t have is a pathway beyond the machine that discarded them. That’s a gap we think matters. 💚

@DaughertyR77609 👀

@gitcoin So the issue is capitalism with better APIs? got it

Maybe AI isn't breaking the value function, but exposing how broken it already was. > Your job's replaced by a $20/mo agent. > Your child's tutor doesn't need sleep. > Your doctor competes with a prompt. None of that's a failure of AI, it's a system working as designed: maximized throughput, minimized cost. Except the cost being minimized is us. Displacement matters. Regulation matters. UBI matters. But they're all downstream of a deeper question: is the system we trust to defend human prosperity still defending humans at all?

@ShShelleyta probably both, and the gap reveals an interesting difference in how the system vs. humans each define "value"

@gitcoin Is the $20/mo agent actually replacing the job, or just exposing how little that job was valued?

@ChaneyKellyaa 💯 wtb[uild] better incentives.

@gitcoin The tech isn't neutral when the incentives are cooked from the start.

@ada_weberaj yes. and that speed is telling all of us something about how fast the ground is shifting.

@gitcoin UBI went from fringe idea to boardroom survival topic real quick

@JohnHays448156 us, collectively 💚 regulation is good, and so is building parallel alternatives that don't need permission from incumbents.

@gitcoin I agree, but who writes the regs without Big Tech capturing the whole process?

@leslie_noblea both is right 💚 and we think parents should have the most say in how AI's used for education.

@gitcoin As a parent, the tutor part is both exciting and terrifying.

@JulianParkqw always. the answer right now seems to be: fewer people than last year.

@gitcoin The question is who benefits from the efficiency. Always has been.