With step-by-step instructions and dozens of lines of code written by OpenAIs $20-per-month artificial intelligence chatbot GPT-4, along with some input from Twitter followers, the artist created and launched the Turbo cryptocurrency over the course of a week.

From a cheeky initial $69 that he personally invested, the meme cryptocurrency rose to a serious market cap of $77 million in just a couple of weeks. Slowly, Mankind, 46, has been able to sell enough to afford a house thats closer to his 13-year-old daughters school. He still holds a little more than 10% of the 69 billion tokens.

Turbo joins a crowded field of meme cryptocurrencies, some of which, like Dogecoin and newcomer Pepe coin, have exploded in popularity and in the process have generated billions of dollars. Others, meanwhile, have been produced primarily as a way to separate investors from their money as they dig for that next diamond in the rough. Mankind insists Turbo should fall into the former category, yet hes still surprised by its rapid success.

Its hard to imagine that something so small as an idea, starting with nothinga $20 subscription to GPTcan turn into a multimillion, 10s-of-million, hundreds-of-million market cap project, he told Fortune. Its just mind blowing.

Mankind, who declined to give his real last name for privacy reasons, said the project started as a digital performance art piece, an extension of his experimentation with A.I., which had previously focused on images and programs like Stable Diffusion. He said he wanted to see if the chatbot could help him create a token, even though he didnt know the first thing about coding or smart contracts.

Courtesy of Rhett Mankind

His first prompt, in which he told GPT-4 it was now called MemeCoinGPT, yielded step-by-step instructions on how to create the token and make it popular. First on the list: come up with a name.

Among some of the early suggestions by the chatbot were HypeHoundCoin and StellarSlothToken, but his small group of Twitter followers overwhelmingly preferred TurboToadToken. When it was time to create a logo, GPT-4 gave him a prompt that generated a space-helmet-donning orange cartoon toad (later named Quantum Leap) in the A.I. image generator Midjourney 5.1.

With a name and logo, Mankind was ready to build out the actual infrastructure, but he couldnt because he didnt know how to code.

Instead of heeding GPT-4s suggestion to spend years learning Solidity, the programming language used to create smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, Mankind asked if the chatbot could do the coding for him. It obliged, and over the course of several daysduring which he addressed various coding errors, with help from his Twitter communityMankind and GPT-4 created the first version of the TurboToadToken, or TTT.

After paying $500 on top of his initial investment of $69 to launch the token on the blockchain, Mankinds first test was dead on arrival after a malicious bot purchased nearly all of the tokens. 

The project was a failure at that stage. I thought, Okay, its done, he said.

TTT 2.0

An exasperated Mankind was ready to give up, but his Twitter followers voted overwhelmingly in a poll for him to continue the experiment. After turning to GPT-4 for a new way forward, it suggested a crowdfunding approach where instead of him putting up all the money to start it, investors would pitch in while receiving tokens proportional to what they contributed.

The second launch was a success, albeit with a fresh set of investors and a new name, Turbo, and the token quickly became popular. Digital artist Beeple even mentioned Turbo in his art.

Since the launch in late April, Mankind has mostly stepped back from the project. He made Quantum Leap, the mascot, open to anyones use through a Creative Commons Zero license and has renounced ownership of the smart contract so he can no longer alter the code.

All the assets or elements of the project are in the hands of the community, he said.

While smaller than other online communities backing memecoins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu Coin, the projects Discord has about 500 people in it. Already, some token holders have taken the initiative to list the coin on Dextools, which offers information to traders about decentralized markets. Theyve also set up a Telegram chat and run an art contest that incorporates the token.

Mankind said hes still involved as a regular community member, even after the token made him a multi-millionaireat least on paper (or in code). The community thats emerged around Turbo is conflicted on whether he should hold his tokens long term or slowly sell off some holdings to maintain the coins safety and integrity. He told Fortune he has no plans to sell immediately.

Sums 2023 up perfectly

Neither do many of the coins supporters, including an anonymous crypto investor who goes by the name Doodler.eth online. He bought 1 million Turbo tokens on May 3 for 0.29 Ether, or about $539 as of Wednesday, because he was interested in Mankinds background as an artist and they way he created the token with A.I. Although he exchanged 1 token for an NFT, he still holds 999,999 Turbo, worth about $1,125 as of Wednesday, and said he has no immediate plan to sell them.

During peak memecoin mania above all else the story behind Turbo really caught my eye and sums 2023 up perfectly, Doodler told Fortune in a private Twitter message. Everyone loves a good narrative and what better than art meeting A.I.?

On Tuesday morning, the token rocketed into the top 300 cryptocurrencies on CoinGecko, ticking off one of the final goals Mankind had presented to GPT-4 at the start. By Wednesday, the cryptocurrency had fallen just outside of the top 300 but still had a market cap of about $77 million.

Even though the token looks like an overnight success, Mankind insists it was the culmination of years spent in the Web3 space as a digital artist and investor.

Its difficult, especially when youre just a single person in your bedroom, trying to talk to all these anonymous people around the world to forge a real community, he said. The success of this has put into motion all that work that Ive done over all those years.

That $5 bet could win you $5,000.

Of course, its unbelievable unlikely to win. But it could be a part of sports betting in the very near future, panelists at a major sports betting conference said Wednesday.

Speaking at the SBC Summit North America, officials with gambling companies and professional sports leagues agreed that more rapid-fire betting lots more of it is on the way as technology continues to evolve and legal sports betting expands to new markets.

Andrew Bimson, president and chief operating officer in North America for the data company Sportradar, said microbetting is the fastest-growing segment of in-play betting.

While comparatively small now, he estimated that microbetting could constitute $20 billion worth of bets by 2027.

In-play betting, or bets made after a sporting event begins, is an established segment of a fast-growing industry. Microbetting is a subset of that; a quick, intensely focused bet on the next play or even the next pitch.

In baseball, for example, companies currently offer bets on whether each bater will get a hit, walk, be hit by a pitch, strike out or get an extra base hit, up to a home run.

But it goes deeper than that: Many now let gamblers bet on whether the first pitch of the game, or of a particular inning, will be a ball or a strike, whether it will be put into play as an out or whether it will fall for a hit.

Still to come are bets on the speed of the next pitch. Similar bets are already offered in football, most commonly on whether a teams possession will end in a touchdown, a field goal, a punt or a turnover.

Customers are immediately engaged in the bet, said Mark Hughes, chief product officer for PointsBet. You dont have to wait very long for your bet to settle. Youre going to get more play, longer sessions. Its going to be a really popular bet going into the future.

Betr, a new microbetting company that is currently live in Ohio and Massachusetts, is building its business around the concept.

It introduces instant gratification to the sports betting experience, said Joey Levy, the companys founder and CEO. He said he believes microbetting could become the preferred way for people to bet on sports before long. He offered the hypothetical Aaron Judge bet as an example of what could be coming soon to the smart phones of gamblers around the country.

And that worries Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, who says the rapid-fire nature of microbetting flies in the face of responsible gambling behavior.

That heavy frequency is associated with gambling problems, he said. You can get a hit of dopamine every few seconds; its more akin to playing a slot machine than betting on sports. People can get in this trance-like state where they just try to stay in action, and bet over and over again just to feel that same kind of high.

Levy, the Betr founder, said companies that offer microbetting need to do it honestly, with full disclosure of risks.

I may be one of this industrys only executives that says the house always wins and that customers should expect to lose over the long-run, he said. It should be a form of entertainment. We approach microbetting the same way: You allocate $20 or $50 or $100 to make $2 bets on a pitch.

Scott Kaufman-Ross, vice president and head of fantasy and gaming for the NBA, said microbetting is well suited for basketballs rapid style of play because there are so many changes in scoring.

Our game is so fast you could have three possessions in the span of eight seconds, he said.

One betting market the NBA has become interested in is in predicting team streaks. Many sportsbooks currently offer so-called race-to bets, in which a customer bets which team will be the first to score 8, 10, 15 or more points. Those bets are made before the game starts, but Kaufman-Ross said the league is interested in crafting similar betting markets during the game to let customers bet on the next sustained run of points.

Say the (Golden State) Warriors are down 15, and then Steph (Curry) gets hot and the score is then tied how do you build something around that? he said. How do you make that something that happens in-game and predicts the next run?

Kevin Fulmer, vice president of digital sports for Caesars Entertainment, agreed the new technology presents new opportunities for gambling companies.

We know the technology is there, he said. Its all about sending the right bet to the right customer at the right time.

The popular offering will be available until the end of May, according to a press release this week from the Biden Administration outlining the transition of Covid measures. Since the online portal launched in January 2022, the program has distributed more than 750 million rapid antigen tests to over two-thirds of American households.

The public health emergency officially ends on Thursday. The government has stockpiled more than 600 million tests to meet demand if there is a future surge of Covid cases, according to the release. 

Households are eligible for four additional tests if the last order to a specific residential address was before Dec. 15, 2022. The Department of Health and Human Services urged prior participants of the program to check if their existing Covid test expiration dates have been extended before throwing them out.

The wind-down of the health emergency also affects Medicare beneficiaries, who wont be able to get free tests unless they are ordered by a health provider. Medicaid, meanwhile, will continue to cover at-home and PCR tests until September 2024. Private insurance providers will decide their own policies, though the Department of Health and Human Services has encouraged insurers and employer health plan sponsors to continue covering the tests without requiring beneficiaries to pay out-of-pocket costs.

Free tests arent the only thing that will disappear as the US ends its emergency measures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will stop counting infection, transmission and community-level case numbers in its Covid Data Tracker because laboratories wont be required to submit the figures. 

The horses are part of the caisson platoon of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, known as the Old Guard, which is best known for guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the cemetery, located just across the river from Washington.

Two Old Guard platoon horses, Mickey and Tony, had to be euthanized within days of each other in February 2022. Both died from colon impaction, a dry, firm mass of feed, or foreign material, such as dirt or sand, and in Tonys case, he had to be euthanized because the sand and gravel impaction was so extensive it could not be surgically removed, according to an Army investigation.

After the deaths of the two horses, both in their 20s, veterinarians found sediment in the manure of other horses, likely because they had so little grass in their turnout fields and consumed sand and gravel from the ground as they ate hay, the investigation found.

Compounding the problem, the hay was so low quality that it could not be easily digested by older horses like Tony and they nosed it around on the ground looking for edible feed. Army veterinarians noted the issue six months before the horses deaths but did not raise their concerns past the platoon leadership. And the platoon had no way to force the hay supplier to provide higher-quality hay because the Army contract did not specify the nutritional value required.

When the horses did get to graze outdoors, those small turnout fields were also littered with construction debris and manure, and even if they had been in proper condition, would only have been large enough to support six or seven horses, the investigation found. At the time of the horse deaths, the field was used for a herd of 64.

The commanding general of the Military District of Washington, Army Maj. Gen. Allan Pepin, said the conditions were a result of mismanagement, not soldier abuse. Pepin said the conditions reflected a lack of full understanding by Army managers of the horses needs and the training needed for the soldiers to care for them, and also a lack of resources.

The platoon took it personal because nobody wanted this outcome, Pepin told reporters on Wednesday. Every time you went by and saw the missions, we never saw a horse that looked like it was lame. We never saw a horse that looked like it was having issues. What we saw was expert soldiers and horses that looked great. So it kind of masked the underlying problem.

In the months since, the Army has retired older horses, some as old as 20 that were still part of the group pulling the more than 2,500-pound caissons, which date back to 1918. It has also begun the process of buying new horses, and will no longer purchase gray horses, because they are likelier to develop skin cancer. The unit has also leased additional pasture land and received funding from Congress to improve the stables.

The Army is also working on obtaining a lighter caisson to put less strain on the horses and developing new saddles and other tack to better prevent horse injuries, Pepin said.

Since the euthanizations, the Army has brought on a full-time herd manager and been able to improve the horses diets, Pepin said, and regular veterinary bloodwork shows they are making progress. However, two additional horses have had to be euthanized since, one due to a leg fracture and one due to intestinal issues.

Last week. the Army decided caisson operations would be suspended for 45 days to give the horses time to recover from any injuries.