Key Highlights
- Vitalik Buterin affirmed that AI development should now focus on human control and safety.
- He mentioned that the Ethereum blockchain can play an important role in the development of AI.
- He wants to achieve AI’s vision of “don’t trust, verify.”
On February 9, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a post on X, where he shared a roadmap for Ethereum’s role in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
In the post, he stated that instead of rushing to develop the artificial general intelligence (AGI) first, the community must focus on decentralization, human control, and other security measures.
This statement comes as a direct response to the Solana founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, who suggested that he “work on AGI”.
“I appreciate the compliment, for him to think that I am capable of contributing to such a lofty thing. However, I get this feeling that the frame of “work on AGI” itself contains an error: it is fundamentally undifferentiated, and has the connotation of “do the thing that, if you don’t do it, someone else will do anyway two months later; the main difference is that you get to be the one at the top” (though this may not have been Toly’s intention). It would be like describing Ethereum as “working in finance” or “working on computing,” stated in the post on X.
Vitalik Buterin Shares Ideas for Ethereum to Help the AI Sector
At present, users have to put their trust in the private companies to use most AI applications. Buterin wants to change that as he shares tools that allow people use AI without compromising their privacy.
This could mean that one can run a small AI model directly on your device, or use cryptographic technology, such as zero-knowledge proofs. This would allow them to pay for an AI service without the provider ever knowing who you are. The main idea behind this is verification without blindly trusting anything.
Apart from this, he suggested Ethereum as an economic coordination layer, which can help them to create decentralized AI ecosystems.
There are examples like paid AI, which calls autonomous agents, hiring other agents, security deposits, on-chain dispute resolution, and emerging standards like ERC-8004 for AI reputation.
In the post, he repeated a motto, “don’t trust, verify.” One can not personally check every line of code in an app. Vitalik Buterin suggested that AI can finally make this possible and he mentioned a personal AI assistant that can check smart contracts for you before you sign, audit code, explain complex risks in simple terms, and ensure your transactions are safe.
According to Vitalik Buterin, many great ideas for community governance and complex markets have failed because they were so complicated for humans to manage. He affirmed that AI can run these systems. One can think of AI managing prediction markets or helping communities allocate funding for public projects efficiently.
“In the long term, this may involve crazy things like humans uploading or merging with AI, for those who want to be able to keep up with highly intelligent entities that can think a million times faster on silicon substrate. In the shorter term, it involves much more “ordinary” ideas, but still ideas that require deep rethinking compared to previous computing paradigms,” he said.
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