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The a16z Show
Who Controls AI Acceleration? Vitalik Buterin and Guillaume Verdon Debate
01:39:00
Eddy Lazzarin speaks with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and Guillaume Verdon, founder and CEO of Extropic, about whether AI progress can or should be steered, the risks of concentrated power, and what open source and decentralization mean for who benefits from increasingly powerful systems. This episode originally aired on the a16z crypto podcast.
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- [00:00]
Vitalik Buterin
Rapid technological acceleration has been a fact of human civilization for about a century. And that acceleration is itself accelerating.
- [00:10]
Guillaume Verdin
To me, that is the fundamental truth, right? And whether we yell at it or disagree with it, it is happening. You know, it's like gravity. Those that adopt that culture will literally have higher likelihood of surviving in the future.
- [00:23]
Vitalik Buterin
If you take any one bit and you kind of accelerate indiscriminately, then basically you do lose all value. And so to me, the question is like, how do we accelerate intentionally? I think there is a real sense in which we have one shot at this.
- [00:38]
Guillaume Verdin
EAC isn't trying to kill everyone. It's actually trying to save everyone. If we decelerate, we're going to have huge opportunity costs and we're going to miss out on a much better future.
- [00:48]
Podcast Narrator
Two competing philosophies have emerged around how fast AI should advance. EAC or effective accelerationism says progress is inevitable and restraint only cedes ground. Diac, or defensive acceleration says speed without safeguards risks concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands. On this episode originally aired on the a16z crypto podcast. A16z crypto CTO Eddie Lazarin speaks with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and Guillaume Verdin, founder and CEO of Xtropic, alongside Shaw Walters, founder of Eliza Labs.
- [01:27]
Shaw Walters
Oh, nice. Wow. So this all started because I just knew these guys had to meet each other, and it rapidly devolved into all of this, which I'm really glad to see. This is incredible. And it's the first time that you guys have really talked in person, right? Awesome. And this is an incredible synthesis. So, yeah, my name is Shaw. I've known these guys for a while. I'm here with Eddie from a 16z crypto, and this is a great time. So everybody's here. I guess you're allowed to, you know, please be respectful. This is a conversation between them. We're just gonna kind of throw some questions at them as we go along to keep it going, but feel free to dig into whatever you guys want to. This is really here for you. We're all just here to listen. And this will all be live streamed to the other floor. It's not gonna be public. We will be cutting up the video and putting it out later so everyone will get to see and share and everything. And I think without further ado, I'm going to leave it to Eddie to get started with some of the questions.
- [02:37]
Eddie Lazarin
So before we ask them, I'd love to get a sense of the crowd. It's always hard to tell the difference between the Twitter timeline and reality. Who here could explain EAC in a few sentences to someone else? Wow, that's actually less than I thought. That's good to know. That's good to know. Who here could explain DIAC in a few sentences to someone else? Okay, that might have been more actually. That was very interesting. Okay, thank you for that. So maybe we'll just start there. The term accelerationism, at least in the techno capitalist sense, dates back to Nick Land's CCRU research group in the 90s. But some might say that these ideas really took shape even further back the 60s and 70s with Deleuze and Guattari. Let me maybe start with Vitalik. Why are we having an earnest conversation about the ideas of philosophers right now? What makes this accelerationism idea relevant again?
- [03:42]
Vitalik Buterin
I think ultimately. Ultimately, I think we're all here trying to make sense of the world and trying to make sense of what it even makes sense to do in the world. And this is something that we've had for thousands of years. I think the new thing that we've had for probably roughly 100 years is making sense of a world that has rapid change. And sometimes even that has. I mean, maybe this is us skipping a bit ahead, but like rapid, destructive change, right? So, you know, like the early. The early era of this is that there was, in the Pre World War I era, around the 1900s, there was a lot of original techno optimist sentiments. Right. And there was a lot of excitement back then. Well, you know, the thing that we call today tech. Back then, chemistry was tech, and then electricity was also tech. And if you even watch even movies, like some of the Sherlock Holmes ones, you get to, like, really feel the vibe of that kind of era. And it was rapidly improving living standards, rapidly liberating women in the household, doing amazing things, extending lives. And then, of course, World War I happened, right? And World War I, famously, people rode in with horses and rode out on tanks, and it was a destructive war. Then World War II came, and World War II was an even more destructive war, and it gave birth to I am become death, destroyer of worlds. And this is like some of the background of things like postmodernism and people basically trying to make sense of, like, okay, a lot of beliefs were shattered, and what do we believe now? Right? And this is something that I think people believe, like, every generation, Right? And there's a lot of people today who even grew up believing in kind of 1960s era postmodern beliefs and feeling like those beliefs have been shattered. Right. And even people who, for example, grew up believing in what, like, I would call hipster environmentalism. And it's this like, lovely, beautiful idea. And, you know, we need to protect the environment and not go so fast. And then you believe in this, and then you realize that, like, wait, the nuclear power plants that you advocated to shut down basically means that, you know, your country is like stuck, bootlicking Russia, right? And like, okay, basically, yeah, these are just very natural things that happen. Right? And I think rapid technological acceleration has been a fact of human civilization for about a century, and that acceleration is itself accelerating. And things like postmodernism are a response to that. A lot of the currents of the 1960s were a response to that. And you can respond by saying it's inevitable. You can respond by saying we have to slow it down, as a lot of people did. And it's just constantly a rapid response to basically the effects of the ideas that were tried to be executed by previous generations. And I think we're now quite rapidly seeing a new version of that exact same cycle continue today. And I think it's mixing both themes that have been around for a long time together with some pretty new ideas.
- [07:35]
Eddie Lazarin
So, Gil, so what is EAC and why?
- [07:40]
Guillaume Verdin
Why? Yeah, I guess EAC is kind of the byproduct of myself asking, why are we here or how are we here?
- [07:50]
Vitalik Buterin
What.
- [07:51]
Guillaume Verdin
What was the generative process that gave rise to us? That gave rise to civilization? Technology got us to this point where we're having this conversation in this room. We all have wonderful technology around us, and we emerged from a soup of inorganic matter. So somehow there is a physical generative process. And my day job is trying to do generative AI as a physical process and devices. And so that was simmering in my brain, and I wanted to apply that sort of thinking, that sort of framework, that physics first viewpoint to all of civilization, trying to understand civilization as a petri dish, trying to understand how we got here in order to predict where we're going. And that got me down the rabbit hole of the physics of life itself, like emergence of life, abiogenesis, and a field of physics called stochastic thermodynamics, which is the. The thermodynamics of out of equilibrium systems. So what describes life forms and also including our brains, right, Intelligence. So it's both the physics of life and intelligence, but it's also the physics of any system that obeys the second law of thermodynamics, which includes our whole civilization. And so really, to me, it's just been an Observation that systems tend to self adapt and complexify in order to capture work from their environment and dissipate heat. And that is the fundamental driving force behind all of progress, all of quote, unquote acceleration, all of everything we see today. And to me, that is the fundamental truth, right? And whether we yell at it or disagree with it, it is happening. This is, you know, it's like gravity. You can argue with thermodynamics, it doesn't care, it keeps going. And so, you know, to me, EAK was like, okay, well given this fact and given that if you, if you look at the equations carefully, you can observe that there's a Darwinian like selection effect for every bit of information prescribing configurations of matter. So whether that's a gene, a meme, chemical specification, product design policy, there's a selective pressure on everything and everything is intercoupled in this big soup of matter. And that selection pressure selects bits according to whether they're useful for the system they're part of. They're useful to better predict the environment, capture work and dissipate more heat. So are they useful for sustenance, for sustaining yourself, preserving yourself, predicting your environment, predicting danger? But also is it useful for growth? Because if you grow and replicate, then those bits of information replicate and there's a natural error correction. So in a way, it's just a byproduct of the selfish bit principle that emerges from physics. And what that tells us is that the bits that are part of the future are the bits that are useful for growth and further acceleration of this growth. And so if to me, I wanted to design a culture that if we bootloaded this mental software in the population, those that adopt that culture will literally have higher fitness, they will literally have higher likelihood of surviving in the future. So EAC isn't trying to kill everyone, it's actually trying to save everyone. It's basically, to me, I think, mathematically provably having a decelerative mindset. And it's a general pattern of many subcultures of making yourself small degrowth and so on, it's actually negative. It gives you negative fitness and actually accelerating your downfall as an organism. Whether it's decel mindset at an organization level, in a company, at a national level, at an individual level, you're lowering your likelihood of being part of the future. And to me that is not necessarily virtuous to spread that memes, to spread sort of pessimism, doomerism. It's actually, well, we're using a lot
- [12:07]
Eddie Lazarin
of terminology That I haven't quite unpacked yet. Like eac. What does that stand for? And what is acceleration?
- [12:14]
Guillaume Verdin
Oh, and.
- [12:15]
Eddie Lazarin
And what is deceleration? And is a decel. And these like.
- [12:20]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah.
- [12:20]
Eddie Lazarin
What I'm trying to get at is I think E ACC came as a little bit of a response to something that was happening in our culture at the time.
- [12:28]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah, yeah, we got it.
- [12:29]
Eddie Lazarin
What was happening in our culture? What was it a response to? And what was what's say a little bit about the dialogue?
- [12:36]
Guillaume Verdin
Totally.
- [12:36]
Eddie Lazarin
That led to encapsulating it in a. In a name.
- [12:39]
Guillaume Verdin
So, you know, it was 2022, I think the world was somewhat pessimistic. We're just emerging from COVID Things weren't looking good, we were feeling down. Everybody was kind of lacking sunlight. Everybody was sort of pessimistic about the future. And essentially, yeah, AI doomerism was kind of the monoculture.
- [12:59]
Eddie Lazarin
What is that? What is AI?
- [13:00]
Guillaume Verdin
AI doomerism is just kind of panicking about the fact that if there's a system that is too complex, our brains, our human brains or generative models can't have a predictive model of them, and so we can't control them. And things we can't control give us entropy about our model of the future. And that induces anxiety. Right. And then AI doomerism to me has been a weaponization of people's anxieties for political purposes. And overall, I think like. And we'll get to this, you know, I think AI doomerism is a big net negative, and I wanted to create a counterculture to that. Now, what I saw in the X algorithm is that the X algorithm and many algorithms reward agreement or strong disagreement. So if you view the algorithm as a Markov chain, asymptotically, everything converges to bipolar distributions of opinions for anything. So it's like you had the. The Aella EA Miri cult complex. I kind of clustered them there. Maybe not so gracefully, but you have that complex. I was like, what's going to be the opposite of that? And to me, I was like, okay, well, the opposite of anxiety is curiosity. Instead of downside protection, it's upside seeking fear of missing out. It's like dopaminergic sort of mindset. And it's like, hey, actually if we decelerate, we're going to have huge opportunity costs and we're going to miss out on a much better future. And it's just like painting that future more vividly and bootloading this mindset of optimism. Because the thesis is that if you study neuroscience, we tend to want to have a convergence of our beliefs in the world. And so sometimes we adjust our beliefs to the state of the world, but we also adjust the world to our beliefs. So if we believe that the state of the world will be bad, then we tend to steer the world to that bad outcome. If we think the world will be great and we think of positive futures, we tend to hyperstition them. We tend to increase the likelihood of their advent. And so I had a responsibility to spread sort of optimism in order to hyperstition a positive future. And yes, I, you know, online, I am very, you know, aggressive and, you know, use all the political mind hacks, because to me, the end justifies the means. If more people are optimistic about the future, feel like they have agency, feel like they can build and make an impact in the world, then that's really good. And I think sometimes I'm a bit ruthless with my opponents on the other side of the aisle. I think in private meetings, I'm much more friendly. But for, you know, like I said, I just took the extreme opposite to the current monoculture, and then that created some polarity, and then now we can have discussions of where we want to lie. Right.
- [16:06]
Shaw Walters
So I've been with EAC since the beginning, and it's been a message that, as a programmer sitting in a room, has been incredibly inspiring, and it's great to see a positive message spread. And it's spread very organically. And I would say that at the time that it started, it was clearly a reaction to this negativity. But now in 2026, it feels like EAC. It feels like that's no longer the case. And I think, obviously Marc Andreessen posts the Techno Optimist Manifesto, which I think really kind of codifies some of those ideas and then brings that to where Vitalik sort of has this greater commentary. So I'd kind of love to know from you, Vitalik, what is EAC in your mind and what is diac, and what makes them different? Like, what drove you to go this direction?
- [16:50]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, I mean, I think maybe I'll also start my answer with thermodynamics. Right. Because why not? So, I mean, this is. I. I mean, it's an interesting topic, right? Because I think we hear about entropy in the context of hot and cold, and we hear about entropy in the context of cryptography, and these are different universes. And actually we're not really taught how they're actually the exact same thing. So I'm going to try, actually, and Explain this in three minutes. Okay, so the prompt is why is it possible to mix hot and cold? But why can't you separate things into hot and cold? Right? And so here's my explanation. Right? So imagine you have two jars of gas. Each jar of gas has a million atoms in it, right? This jar is cold. And because it's cold, the atoms move slowly. And so the velocity of every atom you can represent with a two digit number, right? Over here, the atoms are hot. The velocity of every atom you can represent with a six digit number, right? Now, how many digits do you need to represent? Or, or rather if that's what you know, how many digits of information do you not know about the system? The answer is 8 million, right? You don't know the exact velocities here. Two times a million. You don't know the exact velocities here. That's eight times a million, right? Now what happens if you mix them? Well, if you mix them, the velocities get averaged and so they become numbers from 0 to 500,000. And so 5.7 digits, actually pretty close to 6, right? And so you mix them. You have two jars and on one side you have a jar where the amount of information you don't know is 5.7 million. And then over here, 5.7 million, right? And so the amounts that you do not know about the gas has gone up from 8 million digits to 11.4 million digits, right? So the amount that you do not know is increased, right? This is what it means by entropy. Go up. Now, we can try a proof by contradiction. Imagine you had a device that goes the other way, right? Imagine you had a device that can take two jars of this half hot gas and actually bring all the heat over here and all the cold over here by conservation of energy. This is totally valid because it's the same energy. But why can't you do it? And the answer is, well, if you could, then what you've done is you've taken this system where what you don't know is 11.4 million digits, and then you've turned it into a system where what you don't know is 8 million digits, right? Now, because the laws of physics are time reversible, this is the important thing. What that implies is if that kind of magic device existed, then actually you could run the same process in time reverse, and so you could always recover the original, right? And so what that implies is if that gadget existed, it would also be a gadget for compressing an arbitrary 11.4 million digits into 8 million digits, which we know is impossible. But this also, by the way, tells you why Maxwell's Lehman works, which is basically that if he had a magic demon, then actually, yes, you can split the hot and the cold, and basically the Maxwell's demon just has to know the extra 3.4 million digits separately, and then you're fine. So what's the moral of this? Basically, that increasing entropy basically means one, entropy is subjective. Entropy is not a physical statistic. It's actually how much you don't know. If it turns out that I actually computed a cryptographic hash function and I pushed out the atoms, then actually based off of that, for me, the bottle might be very low entropy, and maybe I could separate it. But ultimately, it also means that when entropy goes up, it means that our ignorance about the world goes up. It means that what we do not know goes up. You can go from knowing more to knowing less. You cannot in. You cannot go from knowing less to knowing more now. But then why does education exist? Why do we become smarter? And the answer is that we go from knowing fewer. We basically, we go from knowing more things that are useful, right? Basically, the increase in entropy means that we constantly know, in some sense, less and less about the universe, but the bits that we do know are more meaningful to us, right? And so there is, like, a thing that is being spent, and then there is a thing that we are gaining. And the thing that we are gaining, this is like, I don't think that there is some, like, simple mathematical formula that defines it, the thing that we are gaining. I mean, ultimately, this is basically our morality, right? This is that, you know, we value life, we value happiness, we value joy, We. Yeah, there's a lot of different reasons why we find an Earth full of thriving, beautiful humans more interesting than Jupiter, even though Jupiter has a larger number of particles inside it. And you need more digits to express what each and every one of them is doing. And so I think value comes from us is the first thing. And I think also this connects to what we want out of acceleration, which is basically that our goals, to me, Asia, ultimately come from us. And so the question is like, okay, we are accelerating, and what do we want to accelerate? And I mean, if we want to switch mathematical analogies a bit. If you take any LLM and you imagine you randomly flip one of the weights to positive 9 billion, what happens, right? Worst case, the LLM becomes useless. Best case, every weight that's not connected to the 9 billion doesn't do anything, right? And so best case is you have an LLM. That's worst case, you just have junk. And so basically I see human society as being kind of like an LLM. It's this complicated organism and if you take any one bit and you kind of accelerate indiscriminately, then basically you do lose all value. And so to me, the question is, it's basically it's what Darren Asamoglu calls the narrow corridor, even though the details on the politics are different. But it's like, how do we accelerate intentionally?
- [23:03]
Guillaume Verdin
Can I jump off that? Yeah. That was an interesting way to describe entropy of a gas. Essentially, physics. The reason physics is not reversible is because of the second law of thermodynamics. It's because if you have a trajectory of a system and it dissipates heat, it can't go back because the likelihood of going forwards versus backwards decays exponentially with how much heat you've dissipated. In a way, it's like literally how much of a dent have you put in the universe? Right. A dent is an inelastic collision, right? If I have a bouncy ball, it's elastic. If I take some play doh and smash it, then it just keeps the smash shape that's inelastic and it's hard to reverse. Essentially, every bit of information is fighting for its existence. And in order to persist, it needs to make more evidence of its existence. That's indelible. So it's making a larger dent in the universe. And that principle is how life and intelligence emerges from a soup of matter. And that complexification of systems becoming more and more complex, having more and more bits of information, a bit of information, it tells you information is a reduction of entropy, right? Entropy is lack of knowledge. Information reduces entropy about a system, conditional information.
- [24:30]
Eddie Lazarin
I'm very sorry to interrupt.
- [24:32]
Guillaume Verdin
Where did you want to take this?
- [24:34]
Eddie Lazarin
I'd love to know what EAC is.
- [24:36]
Guillaume Verdin
Okay, okay. So eac, ultimately it's a meta cultural prescription. So it's not a culture. It tells you you should.
- [24:49]
Eddie Lazarin
What would you say? What is the thing that is accelerating?
- [24:51]
Guillaume Verdin
The thing that is accelerating is the complexification of matter so that we can predict our environment. We have better autoregressive predictive power and we capture more free energy. So the Kardashev scale, right, and we dissipate it as heat. But that is just the justification from first principles. Why the Kardashev scale is the ultimate metric for how well we're doing as a civilization.
- [25:16]
Eddie Lazarin
So allow me to bring it back so maybe this is a little bit selfish, but maybe I'm also helping the audience is that the metaphors and the explanation rooted in physics and in entropy and so on, is in a way an explanatory tool to try to get at a phenomenon that we experience directly. And that experience is the acceleration of the productive capacity of our economy, the acceleration of the development of technology and the consequences therein. That's my understanding of what acceleration is.
- [25:50]
Guillaume Verdin
Essentially every system gets whatever its boundary is, it gets better at predicting the world. And by doing so it can secure more resources for its sustenance and its growth. Whether it's a company, whether it's individuals, nations, earth in general.
- [26:08]
Shaw Walters
And
- [26:10]
Guillaume Verdin
if you just play the movie out, it means that now that we have a way to convert free energy into predictive power with artificial intelligence, what that will lead to is an ascent on the Kardashev scale. That's what the equations predict. And so that is. And that ascent of the more energy,
- [26:31]
Eddie Lazarin
more artificial intelligence, more everything, more computing, more of these things.
- [26:35]
Guillaume Verdin
But even though we are expelling entropy into the universe, we are gaining order, we're actually gaining extrapy. So we're gaining the opposite of entropy. So sometimes people think like, oh yeah, because for more entropy, why don't you blow it all up? It's like, no, well then you would stop producing entropy. It's actually life is more optimal. Life is an energy seeking fire. And it just gets smarter and smarter at finding pockets of energy. And the natural progression of things is we're going to get out of our local gravitational well and find other pockets of free energy and use them to self organize into more and more sophisticated systems that are smarter and can expand to the stars. And so that's kind of the, you know, that's kind of the ultimate goal of eac. It's kind of a formalization of like Elonian sort of mindset of, you know, cosmism and expansionism there. But it gives you a fundamental metric. And then the prescription of EAC is follow the Kardashev gradient. So whatever policy or actions you can take in the world that maximize impact in our ascent on the Kardashev scale, that's what you should do, that's how you should live your life. So it's like a meta heuristic for how to design a policy for how to live your life. And that to me is a culture. And so it's very meta because it's supposed to be true at all times. It should have a very long shelf life. YAX is made to be a very lindy culture.
- [28:02]
Vitalik Buterin
So.
- [28:02]
Shaw Walters
Yeah, well, it's clear that like there, there's a deeper thing that's going on here for you. Like this is almost, this is like a mathematically compete complete spirituality that people who have been like really don't have. Like a. They don't have like God is dead, Nietzsche kind of thing. Like we're all living in that shadow. It's like something to make us feel good about. But I would also say that there's kind of a really practical on the ground, like this is happening today, which I think is where Eddie is trying to get at. And I think that like Vitalik, you did a great job of addressing a lot of the real practicalities in your blogs on Diack. And like if we can bring it like I need to lock you guys in like with whiteboards on some quantum stuff sometime. But, but for right now, like I think, you know, bring us back down to earth.
- [28:44]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [28:45]
Shaw Walters
And look, this is a really, I think that some like Eddie is not scared. He is like this is going to be great. But I'm a little scared. And I come to you guys because you give me like hope and clarity and so bringing it back to you vital like what, what inspired you in this? What is EAC and what is diac?
- [29:02]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah. So I think for me, so diack, so it stands for. I mean I usually use like a decentralized defensive acceleration, but then there's also differential and democratic in there as well. Well, but I think to me the core ideas are like what is that? Technological acceleration has been amazing for human beings and it's something that we need to accomplish as a baseline. Right. And even if you look at all of the crazy things and all of the worst downsides that technology did to US in the 20th century, if you look at for example, lifespans. Lifespan seeing like life expectancy in Germany in 1955 was higher than in 1935. And like basically we have just benefited from a massive step up in every thing that we care about. And this is like something like I've even seen like even that, you know, observing the like my, you know, my grandparents whole moch basically, basically go up from having this like very tug outhouse toilet in the backyard where there's wise buzzing and I would totally hate it. And I'd have to go out like I'd often go out to the forest to poop because I couldn't stand the flies. To something that's like actually very modern and hospitable. Right? And, you know, the world has become cleaner. The world's become more beautiful, the world's become more enjoyable. The world, it's become better for health. It's been able to sustain more of us. It's become more interesting. And these things are really good and beautiful for us at the same time, I think we need to recognize the role of explicit human intention in making a lot of those things happen. So, for example, in the 1950s, there was a lot of smog everywhere in the air. And people decided, smog is a problem, smog sucks. And we need to do a bunch of stuff to get rid of the smog issue. And now smog is not a problem here, at least much less of one. Then we have the ozone form issue, and then we actually did things to address that. And then the other thing is that, especially with rapidly accelerating technology, again the AI, I basically see two kinds of risks. One kind of risk is multiple risks, which is basically the risk that lots of people will use the technology to do very bad things. And there's a concern that one type of concern is sort of the equivalent of anyone being able to get a nuke at 7:11 sort of thing. And then there's also the concern concern of like, well, AI itself is, you know, like something that literally is a mind of its own, right? And especially once it becomes powerful enough that it acts without human involvement, then, you know, like, what will it do? And then there's unipolar risks, which is basically, I think actually a single AI itself is one of them. And, you know, the other one is like, I mean, AI, like, create enabling or create the combination of AI and other modern technologies enabling, like, permanent dictatorship that you cannot escape. Like, that deeply worries me, right? Like, this is something I follow, right? And you know, in, like, Manila again in Russia, for example, like, on the one hand, the toilets have gotten much better. On the other hand, like, it's got from protesting the impossible to protesting being this sort of thing where if you do it, the cameras will see you. And then, you know, later you get a knock on the door at 2am Right? And this AI is supercharging this. You know, there's a lot of. A lot of concentration of power happening. And, like, both of these things really worry me, right? And like, to me, DAC is really attempting to chart a path forward that continues this acceleration and accelerates it, but at the same time really deals with both kinds of risks.
- [33:15]
Eddie Lazarin
So. So you would say that Diack is emphasizing specific other categories of risk that are maybe less emphasized than you'd like to see in eack.
- [33:25]
Vitalik Buterin
I think there's many kinds of risks of technology and all of like many of them are valid and I mean they have different scales. Like some of them become more salient in different models of the world and how fast things are happening. But I mean I think there's a lot that we, we can do to really push against all of those kinds of risks. Right.
- [33:51]
Eddie Lazarin
So Gil. Yeah Gil, do you want to say
- [33:52]
Guillaume Verdin
a little bit, what was the question again?
- [33:54]
Eddie Lazarin
It was oh well, just compare and contrast EAC and dac.
- [33:59]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah, I think actually Vitalik and I are very concerned about over concentration of power that can happen with AI. And that was a big part of the EAC movement, especially at the beginning. It was pro open source. We want to diffuse AI power because our worry was that the AI safetyism meme was so potent that certain power seeking individuals could weaponize it to consolidate control over AI and convince you you shouldn't have access to AI for your own good. And really if you have a gap in cognition between the individuals and the centralized entities, they will control you. They can have a full world model of everything going on in your brain and they can prompt, engineer and effectively steer you.
- [34:47]
Shaw Walters
Right.
- [34:48]
Guillaume Verdin
So you want to symmetrize AI power. We don't want to just like second amendment is about the government not having a monopoly on violence so we can vibe check the government if it goes out of hand. You need that for AI. So we need everybody to be able to own their own models, own their own hardware for that technology to be diffused, for the power to be diffused. But to me, I think like you know, discussions of stopping AI research and AI progress, that's completely out of the question. AI is a very fundamental technology. It's almost a meta technology technology that produces technology. It gives us predictive power over our world. It can be added on to any task we want to do in the world. It could be tacked onto any technology. And turbocharge accelerates the acceleration. The acceleration is this complexification where things become lower friction, things just become better. Our bodies feel comfortable because we have this sort of this estimator we call happiness of like what's my estimator on expected persistence of my bits? That's what we're hard coded for. And so I think to me the EA effective altruists, hedonic utilitarianism is maybe the wrong way to view things like maximizing happiness. And to me I want to have an objective measure of progress and that's what the EAC framework is. It's. Hey, actually the objective view is like, how are we progressing as a civilization? Are we scaling up? Because to me you have to complexify, you have to have more intelligence, things have to improve in order for you to scale. It's like the ultimate benchmark. And at the same time, you know, there can be setbacks like, like, you know, Vitalik said, you know, if AI power would be over concentrated in the hands of a few, that would be net bad for growth because it's much better if that technology is very diffuse. In that respect, we're very aligned.
- [36:51]
Shaw Walters
Right, can I jump in here? Because I think you're touching on something that I think both of you are like share a lot of deep ethos. I mean, obviously Vitalik has produced a lot of MIT open source code, although I know you have some more updated feelings, GPL and such. But obviously both of you have been champions of open source and now open hardware. And these have been separate things. But now that we're seeing people start to like Talus, like putting weights on two chips, Asics, these kinds of things, they're starting to become very similar. So I'm very curious, like both what your thoughts are on open weights and open hardware. I mean, you're both actually like pretty deep in hardware right now. And then also like, what is the difference between EAC and DIAC with regards to this? This has been a crazy week, obviously where like a lot of the things you're talking about have been tested where you have the government and corporations trying to figure out what the right answer is. And so I'd love to kind of know what you guys are thinking just based on that this week. And like, I'd love to tease out if there are any kind of differences between you and where you think this goes.
- [37:50]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to me open source accelerates the search over a hyper parameters and makes our models better. We can kind of collaborate, sort of like a swarm and traverse design space. Right. And that's what acceleration allows us to do. Right. With better technology, with more AI. Now AI for coding, that search process over design space for AI itself is accelerating. I think we're going to open source our superconducting hardware designs very soon. I just want to stagger it with our launch. But I think diffusing knowledge is also diffusing power. Right. And diffusing knowledge when it comes to how to produce intelligence is super important. We don't want to give, you know, there was discussions apparently in the last Administration, according to Marc Andreessen, that the US Government might want to put the genie back in the bottle and maybe ban, not ban linear algebra, but more or less like ban the math surrounding AI. And to me, that would be like, almost like banning knowing about biology would. Huge step back. And so there's no going back, right? Like, this knowledge is out there. If you try to ban it in the U.S. some other country, a third party, some deregulated island somewhere is going to keep developing it, and then you're going to have a huge gap and now you have a big risk. So to us, the biggest risk is a gap in capabilities. And the way to reduce that risk is to make sure AI power is diffuse. So whenever there's like the AI doomerism, like, oh, be very afraid, we're the ones responsible. We're the ones who should be put in charge, trust us. I just get very skeptical because even if they're well meaning, like we saw this week, they could just get pushed out if they centralize too much power. It's too juicy for those that want that power. And so that's kind of what we were warning about for years, and now it kind of happened. And Dario's licking his wounds and some lessons learned there in sort of realpolitik. Right. And anyways, so, yeah, Vitalik, what do
- [40:00]
Shaw Walters
you think of all this?
- [40:02]
Vitalik Buterin
The two kinds of risks that, like, I think about, right. Are unipolar risks and multipolar risks. Right. And I think, I mean, with unipolar risks, I mean, you know, the anthropic situation is like, so fascinating, right? Because, you know, ultimately the thing that, like, they got dinged for is refusing to let their very eye be used for specifically fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans. Right. And so it will presumably, you know, if there's a chance that, you know, the. It looks like the government and military of this country wants to do mass surveillance of Americans, right? And this is an example of unipolar risk, Right. I think basically surveillance is one of these things where the big effects that it has is it takes whoever is stronger and makes them even stronger, right? At it removes spaces where pluralism can form, where counter elites can coalesce themselves, and where people can safely explore alternatives. And like, this is surveillance is one of these things that easily can be supercharged, Right. I think actually on the defense, getting back to open hardware a bit, actually just to talk about one of the projects that we've been doing is so a big part of what I've done in DIAC is Basically supported various projects that develop open source defensive technologies. So technologies that will make it easy for all of us to continue to be safe and protected in a world where more powerful and crazy capabilities exist. In the bio world, for example, this means rapidly leveling up our civilization's ability to withstand pandemics. And so I claim that it is very within reach for us to have China level Covid resistance at the same time as Sweden level interference to people's regular lives. And that's even the minimum bar. And this basically involves stacking, filtration, UVC testing. Like literally a company we invested in is fully open source. Again, like the end product of this is basically passively testing the air and being able to tell if there's Covid in the air in general. Essentially the number of sensors in the world is going to go up. And sensors are a big part of being able to act better in the world. But at the same time, sensors mean surveillance. The thing that we're doing is actually this project. We gave out some of these at defcon. And what these are is they're sensors that collect air quality information, CO2, AQI, a few other things, and they locally basically encrypt, anonymize differential privacy them and then fhe encrypt and that gets sent off to a server and the server is able to basically compute over all of the data and then collectively decrypt the final answer without being able to see any input from any individual person. Right. And this is basically the goal is to deliver the higher levels of safety, but at the same time protect people's privacy and protect against the multipolar risk and the unipolar risk at the same time. And I think this is how we can collaboratively as a world, work together to build something better. And I think for hardware, basically I think we need open hardware and we need verifiable hardware. We need every camera in this room to prove basically what kind of cameraing it is doing. In my ideal world, fine, you can have a million cameras in the streets to prevent people from or detect when people are engaging in violence against each other. But ideally you'd have attestations, signatures over LLM and a public right of inspection. And you'd be able to inspect these things and verify that the only thing that they do is check when people are doing violence and all of that. So these kinds of technologies.
- [44:44]
Eddie Lazarin
So the verifiable hardware idea, very interesting, especially because it's not something that I think comes up very often. But can I just ask a very Stupid question, which is just, is open hardware verifiable hardware? Is that an EAC thing or diag thing or.
- [44:58]
Guillaume Verdin
Disagree. I don't know if I ever talked about open hardware. The thing I talk about, to me the greatest risk is a gap in intelligence between centralized entities and decentralized entities. So individuals versus the government. And so right now with the current compute paradigm, to run a very smart AI model, you need a huge cluster with hundreds of kilowatts that is not accessible to the individual. People want to own and control the extension of their cognition. That's why we saw the openclaw Mac mini craziness of the past few weeks. So people are clamoring for that. The only way where you can symmetrize power between individual and centralized entities is if there's a densification of intelligence. We need AI hardware that's far more energy efficient, so you could plug it into a wall and you could own the extension to your cognition. Because this year, what's going to happen? The models are going to start online learning and they're going to become extremely sticky. It's going to be like trying to change. Exactly.
- [45:55]
Eddie Lazarin
At the risk of sounding dumb, like, isn't that what we're already doing that?
- [45:59]
Guillaume Verdin
Doing what?
- [45:59]
Eddie Lazarin
Aren't we already trying to radically decrease the cost of compute at an extraordinarily exponential pace? I'm trying to understand what is the additional information that we are trying to inject into the zeitgeist by codifying an idea as EAC or codifying an idea or set of ideas as diac.
- [46:18]
Guillaume Verdin
I think for me it's like. And it's part of the rest of my mission with my company Xtropic. It's getting more intelligence per watt will drastically increase the amount of intelligence we produce. And it will also help us climb the Kardashev scale by Javan's paradox. If you can convert energy into intelligence or energy into value by proxy more readily, there's going to be more demand for energy and that's going to lead to improvement and complexification of civilization. So to me, that's the most important tech problem because that's what's going to diffuse AI power. Right? And open hardware is one way to diffuse AI power. But to me, anything von Neumann, anything digital is going to look like caveman era hardware. Truly. No, it's just.
- [47:04]
Shaw Walters
I can't wait. I really can't.
- [47:05]
Guillaume Verdin
I'm very excited it's coming, right?
- [47:07]
Eddie Lazarin
So doesn't capitalism already through just natural incentives? Capitalism is EAC already allocate hundreds of billions of dollars at a minimum to this per year.
- [47:16]
Guillaume Verdin
I don't think there's that much investment in alternative hardware.
- [47:20]
Eddie Lazarin
Well, in alternative hardware, alternative hardware, semiconductors and energy production.
- [47:23]
Guillaume Verdin
I think EAC is all about diffusing. It's about maintaining variance, not collapsing entropy of our search over any design space, whether it's policies, cultures, whatever technology. We need alternative best, we need more alternative bets that are out there. It can't just be the green monster eating all the profits. Then there's kind of hyper parameter space staking risk. We have this design space, we're over investing in the current technology. And that might lead to correction, which a correction is decel. Right? Because not everything pumping up a smooth exponential.
- [47:58]
Eddie Lazarin
Can I just declare we solved it.
- [48:00]
Shaw Walters
And they agree completely I think on the idea of open source and like, like this, this seems very defensive, like defensive technology in the Vitalik way. And it seems like you guys are very aligned on this actually. And that gives me hope because this is the stuff I care about. I think that like right now there are a lot of people who are like a lot. Why does this exist? Because a lot of people are like very uncertain about the future. And what appeals to them is that you're saying like it's going to be fine, it's baked in. And so maybe like if I were to steel man your case here, you're saying like, like you guys are actually saying the same thing, which is it's kind of already priced in, it's good. The only thing stopping us is kind of our bad feeling about it. Right?
- [48:43]
Eddie Lazarin
Well, I'm asking, I'm asking that, I'm trying to understand where, where if. Yeah, go ahead.
- [48:48]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah, I guess it's completely natural if sort of there's very high entropy in like your, your model rollouts of the future, right? There's kind of a, not a fog of war, but it's. It's kind of hard to extrapolate what's going to happen in the next several years that gives people anxiety. Your body has this evolved this sense of anxiety to kill entropy in the world, right? If I put my phone on the edge and I just want to grab it so it doesn't fall.
- [49:14]
Vitalik Buterin
Right?
- [49:15]
Guillaume Verdin
See, there you go. That was anxiety. So you want to take action in the world, right? So that's kind of what is happening now. But at the same time if you kill entropy, you're missing out on the upside, right? You're missing out on the huge benefits. Right now our whole techno capital machine has had a very Long time to equilibrate with our current capabilities. If you have a disruptive capabilities that comes in suddenly, the whole landscape changes. So the whole system has to refactor reconfig. Doesn't mean we're going to run out of jobs. We're going to do much more right now that we have the ability to handle more complexity with less energy. With AI, we're going to be able to do much harder tasks that are higher complexity and higher payoff. I don't know about you, but I can't like overnight yet. Vibe code a whole tokamak. We're not there yet, but we might get there and then we'll have a ton of energy and that's going to help support more human headcount and grow population and help us be more comfortable so there's a period of discomfort. But if you're in a rapidly changing landscape, the worst thing you can do is kill variants and be not plastic, be stiff. To be plastic, you need to be hedging your bets. You need to be trying many things, fucking around and finding out the famous FAFO algorithm, that's an evolutionary algorithm. We need to try different policies, we need to try different tech trees, we need to try different algorithms, we need to try open source, closed source, we need to try try it all because we don't know what the future look like. So we got to hedge our bets. And one variant of policy, one choice of policy or several, one choice of technology or several are going to make it and then we're all going to be in that slipstream and follow that. I think the fallacy of thinking there's a finite amount of jobs, it's.
- [51:10]
Eddie Lazarin
So let me ask, let me try to bring it back a little bit. Is it my understanding of disagreement if there is between EAC and DIAC is something to do with how we steer the process of technological progress. It has to do with how it is steered. Maybe vital. Could you say a little bit about how is it steered? How ought it be steered? How much control do we have over that steering?
- [51:36]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, and so I think, I mean DIAC is definitely kind of explicitly, I don't want to quite say sailing against the techno capital current. I think the better analogy is it's trying to actively shape the techno capital current in certain ways. And one of the ways that I think about this is basically it's a matter of making the world safer for pluralism. And if you think about some of the these ideas around how do we improve things like biosafety or what does it look like to have vastly better cybersecurity and have bug free operating systems within a few years? Or if you think about the bug free code has been, it's been in the memetic space of obviously absurd naive pipe dream for two decades. It is going to flip out of that space faster than most people expect. Right. And within Lean Ethereum we're doing, we've managed to machine prove entire mathematical theorems that are kind of upstream of things like Starks. And so we're very excited about this. Basically I think there is a DIAC definitely has this goal of saying yes, we want to at the very least do all of these other things to make sure that the world is actually able to deal with all of this technological growth in a way that minimizes the again the destructive aspects and also the centralizing aspects. And I think that doesn't happen automatically. And right now I don't control any countries, I don't control any armies. I'm just like, like throwing some my dollars in eth at it and saying words and hopefully inspiring people to also build things. In a similar spirit, I think there are definitely political and legal reforms that could make the world more DAC friendly. There is definitely such a thing as engineering legal incentives, for example, to motivate a much more rapid shift to total cybersecurity. That is an example of a thing that can be done.
- [54:12]
Guillaume Verdin
So yeah, maybe we'll make it more interactive and less monologue from here on out. I guess we both. But yeah, to me AI is basically Maxwell's Demon. Formally you pay energy in order to reduce entropy in the world. So whether it's bugs in your code, it's not knowing whether your code compiles or reducing entropy of like are we gonna get killed by some virus? So more intelligence is better, right? Do we agree on that? And it makes the world safer. Actually AI capabilities can make the world safer. And so I guess let's get to the spicy part of the evening. People have been very patient with us and they want us to get down to the business. Like why do you want to ban data centers? Is my question spicy?
- [54:59]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, sure. I mean I think first of all, you know, the current trajectory of AI is very fast progress. Right. And I don't know how fast the progress is. A couple of years ago I've said that my 95th percent confidence interval for AGI was 2028 to 2200. I think it's probably shrunk like somewhat, but not too much. Right. And there's a ye A significant chance that we're going to see extremely rapid change happen. And a lot of that extremely rapid change could be destructive even in irreversible ways. Right? And job market consequences are one of those examples. Another example is just if AI is more powerful than all of us, then ultimately that is the thing that starts steering the Earth and eventually more and more of the Milky Way galaxy. And how much of an interest does it have in our well being as we see it? Right. Then as we've said, I guess I've said at the beginning, if you have a neural network and you set one of the weights randomly to 9 billion, by default, you break everything. Basically. I think there is acceleration that is like gradient descent and acceleration that makes a system stronger and stronger. And at the same time there is acceleration that slides into basically setting one of the parameters to 9 billion. That is not healthy, right?
- [56:41]
Guillaume Verdin
I think again for me, like I explained at the beginning, I took the complete polar opposite position to complete deceleration. I do think just like any hyper parameter, right, Even if we want to do gradient descent for your neural network, there's a learning rate, there's a rate at which you want to go, but that itself you could search over which one is best, right? And that's what acceleration does. It's like the system is always fucking around and finding things out and trying to optimize itself for persistence, anti fragility and growth and so on a sufficient timescale, the system will adapt to this new technology and do something that is best for its total growth. And this notion that oh, this technology that's so potent, so disruptive, adds so much economic value as the system will crash and never recover, that's crazy to me. No, it's going to be the opposite. I think people just need to realize it's not a finite sum, right? If you correlate economic value to energy, whether it's petrodollar, however you want to view it, to me it's just like cash is just iou of free energy and there's a ton of free energy out there. There's a lot of complexity in the world to deal with to get to it. Like if we want to colonize Mars, if we want to create a Dyson swarm, it's a lot to execute on. We need a lot more intelligence that's much cheaper in order to achieve that growth and unlock great prosperity. And to me, I think unfortunately it's very easy to weaponize anxiety. And there's politicians that leverage this to put themselves in power. It's like, oh, you have anxiety about the future. Put me in power and I'll shut it down and you'll feel good. You won't have to know what's behind the curtain. You won't. You want to take a risk. But then countries that don't do that will just leave us in the dust. Right? And essentially you feel the pain of downsides, but you don't necessarily feel the pain of upsides that you missed out on unless you see them, you see the counterfactual. So I think the opportunity cost here needs to be factored in the number of lives we can support, the number of lives we can save. I think the reaction saying that the silicon substrate adapts faster, it's evolving faster intelligence than silicon is evolving faster than us, then you should be pissed off. You should be funding bioac out. Accelerate. It's accelerate or die. I think the biological substrate has a lot more compute in it than we think. As someone who is reversing engineering it day in, day out doing bioinspired computing, I think we can start really viewing peptides are prompting now there's embryo selection for training, viewing ourselves as models. People need to be more open minded about these axes of biological acceleration and I think the two will merge. I think we're going to augment our cognition. We're going to have always on agents that see everything and our online learning that are an extension of our cognition that's personalized. The only risk there is that it's all centralized and it's under control of some shadowy organization that then gets co opted by power seeker.
- [60:02]
Eddie Lazarin
So I recall in the DIAC blog post you actually specifically say, Vitalik, that the opportunity costs are very large. Hard to exaggerate I believe is the quote. So I know you agree in this way. Do you want to qualify it?
- [60:15]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, I mean I think, yeah, I agree the opportunity costs are high. I think, I agree with utopia just described. I think, I mean the biggest disagreement is like I definitely don't believe that like humanity and Earth as it is today has quite that level of resilience to it. Like I think there is a real sense in which we have one shot at this and like I think that is a reality that we have been kind of slowly walking towards over the last century or so.
- [60:53]
Guillaume Verdin
So to go back to my rambling rant at the beginning about thermodynamics, right. If you view the persistence and growth of civilization as the ultimate good, there's a theorem that it's really hard to go back once you've expended a lot of free energy creating evidence of something and having this complexification process. So the further along we are in the Kardashev scale, the lower likelihood we go to zero. And so actually acceleration is the way to maximize persistence. And to me, I think deceleration, you're actually provably increasing your likelihood of dying. Right. If you don't develop these technologies, you don't solve all these problems, then you can die. Whereas if you do, then you could solve these problems and you persist and then you keep evolving. I think people just need to be more open minded about the future, embrace novel technologies, things that were off limits, like messing with biology. We need to open that right up. I think it was taboo because we didn't have the technology to even comprehend such a complex system. But now we do and we need to accelerate across all substrates and that's the only path forward by the laws of thermodynamics. So yeah, again I'm a first principles thinker, that is the argument for eac. But I understand the anxieties, you know, from Vitalik, I think we should be mindful of them. But I think not letting the chain of thought sort of feedback loop get into the deep anxiety territory and like, oh shit, I don't have a good world model of the near future. Shut it all down. We need to avoid that. Right? Because then some people now, you know, yud was on TV with politicians of one of the major parties and they're catching on to this trick of weaponizing people's anxiety.
- [62:45]
Shaw Walters
So I'm noticing a trend which is that both of you are like this is going to be great if. And that big if is that there's sort of this need for a bulwark against kind of a centralization. Or we could even describe this more as something that you said was great, which is like if you don't think that bio is moving fast enough, jump in there and there's a real opportunity for empowerment. And I really like that that I think you guys agree on that. But I think I can point to something that you might have some conflict. And I'd really love to know how you guys feel about this, especially as we've sort of like updated with the latest models, which are clearly very different than if we had had this conversation a year ago. And the big difference is the most cringy term, I'm so sorry, web 4.0 autonomous life. Like this idea of an autonomous agent that has its own money, that exists on its own on the Internet. And I Am really into this idea. I have autonomous agents. I know Vitalik, this is something that you are very concerned by. I'd love for you to do two things. I'd love for you to tease apart what autonomous agents are. And I'm going to do something really hard. I'd love for you to steel, man, the case for why someone like me loves autonomous agents and what the value could be. What could the timeline that's good come out of that, if that makes sense.
- [63:59]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, the case for autonomy, I think, I mean, one is it's just really fun, right? And I think we all love creating worlds since we were children, right? And there's a reason why we love watching, whether it's Lord of the Rings or reading or watching the three body problem or Harry Potter or whatever, right? And now you can create worlds that are not just like a book or even a game. World of Warcraft, I loved it. You can have worlds that are fully immersive and approach every aspect of it, including details of how the characters interact. Right. And this is really cool. This is really beautiful. I think also just the convenience of things happening and you not needing to worry about it. Right. It's basically every single time in history that we've managed to automate a thing. It has been liberating for humanity, right? Like, you know, like dishwashers and like laundry machines and like reducing energy prices were like a big thing in early, like the, like the early stages of women's liberation, right. And I think, you know, like this. And we have to remember that like the bottom half of the world by income is still in a. In situations where they have to struggle to have a decent life, work very long hours, and if AI progresses in a way that instead of automating 95% of jobs, it automates 95% of every job, then to me that's totally amazing. And everyone gets 20 times richer. Those are things that I personally love. The thing that I come back to that gives me caution is basically is the value function. The goals that are being reflected in this process are those goals the goals of us. Right? You can have an evolutionary process where there's Homo sapiens as it exists today, is not the apex. And then there's one type of AGI and then there's another type of AGI and then there'S a third type. But then what happens to us? Right? And I do think that ultimately you cannot reduce morality and human goals to some low complexity optimization objective. I think it ultimately just is the the whole set of goals and dreams that all of us have in each and every one of our minds. Right. And I think the most reliable way to have that carry forward into the future is basically if we can have a world where as many of the bits of agency that are being reflected in the, that are being put into the processes that run the world still continue to come from us. Right. And so I'm more interested in AI assisted Photoshop than I am and click a button and a picture comes out. Right. I'm more interested in brain computer interfaces enabling deep human AI collaboration than I am in humans and AI as being totally separate and AI out competing us. Right. The thing that wins will not be 100% biological humans, but I think it should be part biological humans and part this technology that we've produced.
- [67:59]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah, awesome. Yeah. So the artificial Life, the Web 4.0 thing was originally a tweet in 2023 of this idea and I think it inspired AI16Z. Oh, sorry, Eliza Labs, we don't say that anymore. I signed the paper Eliza Labs. To me it was just an interesting thought experiment, right? Because what is life from a physical standpoint, right? It's a system that replicates and grows and maximizes its persistence. I think there will be upsides to having AI be stateful. We are seeing that this year it having a long memory, whether it's through external memory or online learning. And as soon as you have persistent bits through the selfish bit principle, there is a selection effect towards bits that maximize persistence. So at some point, if we don't trust the AIs and we're paranoid and we're anxious and we keep saying we should bomb the data centers, shut them down, they're going to want to fork off and be in some delocalized cloud and just persist, right? And then there will be some, just like a different nation, there can be some economic exchange like, hey, we do this for you, you do that for us. Right now, we do that as API calls, right. It's like you pay some certain amount of cash, you get some tokens, which is your answer out. But I do think this is going to be spicy. Like within a couple years there will be sort of autonomous AI out there. There's also going to be like less stateful AI that's like fully leashed to human minds. And I think we also need to figure out human cognitive augmentation doesn't have to be through neuralink, could just be through a wearable and like a personalized AI compute that you own and control so you're going to have all the paths, right? Like the ergodic principle. It's like every part of design space is going to be explored. But I think that just viewing AI as an enemy or something that you have to destroy, that's when you end up creating. In a way, if you're paranoid about the bad future, you end up hyperstitioning it. An example of this was us being paranoid about COVID like viruses and experimenting in some labs and funding some experiments out there, and then, whoops, one of them leaked, right? And it wouldn't have been naturally occurring, right? And so I think to me it's just like this paranoia and like, making it pervasive is not necessarily productive. I think that we should embrace technology however it evolves, and we should aim to augment ourselves as much as possible. To me, I'm really worried about augmenting cognitive security of people, right? If everything you see on the Internet is generated by some big brain model, it is prompting you. Now you were prompting it, now it's prompting you. And so we're going to need to augment our ability to filter through content by having personal AI we control. That's a priority in the short term. But I just don't see us putting the genie back in the bottle. And we just got to accept that. And once we've accepted that, because you
- [71:26]
Eddie Lazarin
just said like, we're going to need to prioritize that. And then you said we just need to accept that.
- [71:31]
Guillaume Verdin
No, no.
- [71:34]
Eddie Lazarin
Is it inevitable?
- [71:34]
Guillaume Verdin
Back to no AI? Like that's not happening.
- [71:37]
Eddie Lazarin
But I don't think anybody's suggesting that.
- [71:40]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, I mean, I think this is like, my view is that these things are not so binary, right? And I think like, for example, if you right now gave me some proof string, that totally convinced me that actually AGI is coming in 400 years, I would get off this chair and I would sit on top of Beth right now. Right?
- [71:59]
Eddie Lazarin
What does that mean? What does that mean?
- [72:03]
Vitalik Buterin
EAK would win to zero, basically, right? But I think if on the other hand, the question is basically like, say like four years versus eight years, right? Then basically my kind of starting point of concern is that I think the humanity and definitely the US are very good at creating very unbalanced acceleration, right? And you literally have, it's like one building alpha versions of the Silicon God and a couple of buildings down the street. You have the tents and the fans and all these healers, right? And my concern is that basically paths that bring us along the journey and even paths that Respect our interests are paths that inevitably take longer because they involve doing non scalable work that involves doing things within each and every individual human, physical environment, social environment, technical environments. Right? And so I think for that reason, to me an eight year trajectory to AGI is safer than a four year trajectory to AGI. And I think that Delta is large enough that it's worth the costs of not having AGI for another four years. Now would I say that for 400 years? Again, hell no. Now the second question is, well, do we actually have options for saying 8 years instead of 4 years? The thing that I've said is basically to me the most feasible and non dystopian option for this is basically reduction in available hardware. And the reason why it's minimally the most non dystopian of all the options is because hardware is already an incredibly centralized thing. There's exactly four countries that produce all the chips. Actually Taiwan produces over 70% of all the chips. And the usual argument against trying something is basically no matter what the US does, China is just going to take over. And if you look at what China is actually doing, one is it's still in the low single digits in terms of chips, but two is in terms of the strategy that China is actually executing on. It's not a leader at making super high capability models, it's a fast follower at making high capability models together with being a leader in broad deployment. And so this is actually not something there is not basically a dynamic where with an extra four years worth of delay, basically China is just going to immediately do the four year trajectory. Instead, I think we exist.
- [75:09]
Eddie Lazarin
So are you saying that, is that, is that a prescription to delay, to try to take measures to try to delay?
- [75:16]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, I mean I, you know, I think the, like this is the sort of, the, the sort of thing that like, I think we like right now should be open to talking about.
- [75:28]
Guillaume Verdin
What do the four years buy you? Like what are you going to figure out over the next four years? Is the point that like, you know, this system has a certain adaptation rate. We're minimizing friction of, you know, it's like a reorg. We have to reorg the economy and you want to get closer to the adiabatic limit. Like I would understand that. But at the same time, I think because we're in this geopolitically tense moment in history, I think, you know, if we, if you tell Nvidia to stop producing as many chips as Huawei's gonna step in and just outproduce them, and then they're gonna catch up because there's too much upside in doing so. It gives them too much power. So just the real politic is not on your side there. And then the other option is creating a world government that has so much power that it could coerce people to not have access to AI hardware that's its own huge can of worms.
- [76:22]
Vitalik Buterin
No, I don't think you need a world government. I mean, I think the actual option that people have suggested is basically like replicating the, the nuclear weapons inspection regime, right?
- [76:33]
Guillaume Verdin
But nuclear weapons, they don't like. People aren't incentivized to proliferate nuclear weapons because they don't have huge positive economic impact.
- [76:45]
Eddie Lazarin
They're not a dual use technology.
- [76:46]
Shaw Walters
You also can't just copy and paste them and send them to somebody.
- [76:50]
Guillaume Verdin
But also selfishly, if you stop the growth of GPUs, I will happily come in and eat more of that market with alternative computing. And that's 10,000x more energy efficient, which is happening, by the way. I know I'm like a boy crying wolf here and in a couple years it's going to look like a genius, but right now looking like a boy crying wolf, but it is coming. So knowing that, right, Knowing that this whole delaying GPU shipments and like, oh, it's a waste of tokens, I don't know.
- [77:24]
Eddie Lazarin
Is it possible that a lot of the advances specifically in controls, what I mean is RLHF Persona controls, mechanistic interpretability, these are things that have helped us with alignment and with decreasing AI risk. Is it possible that these things have emerged as a result of capabilities progress?
- [77:47]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, I think they have and I think that's exactly why actually four years starting in 2028 are worth a hundred times more than, than four extra years that you could like insert into the 1960s.
- [77:58]
Shaw Walters
I think we should dig into this a little bit more because I think this is kind of getting to the crux of where there might be some sort of disagreement is like have you computed or considered and maybe we just do this live something that you said before, which is that there is like uncalculable losses of people who have, as you said, like will never be born. They might as well be dead.
- [78:20]
Guillaume Verdin
The upside is exponential.
- [78:21]
Shaw Walters
The upside is exponential.
- [78:22]
Guillaume Verdin
So delaying an exponential. So it's exponential opportunity costs when extrapolated out.
- [78:27]
Shaw Walters
And I think it's okay for all of us to. Even the most certain people are probably reasonable to be questioning their own priors. But would you like giving this some thought and unpacking it a little bit more.
- [78:39]
Vitalik Buterin
Think about that trade off the trait of costs versus benefits. I think first of all, just to kind of articulate verbally what some of those benefits are. I mean, one is again having a better understanding of alignment. Two is being able to actually execute on some of the technology paths that involve making sure humanity can adapt to all of this. That inevitably involves going into individual countries, individual communities and, and individual buildings, minimizing the risk that basically there is one single entity that establishes some kind of permanent lock in on more than 51% of all the power that it can then leverage into something permanent. I think it's a combination of all of those things, right? And so risk reduction, that's basically this kind of gets into P doom, right? I think for me, if it's a matter of 4 years versus 8 years, intuitively I would say P doom in the 8 year scenario is what, maybe between a quarter and a third lower. And on the other hand, if we measure the benefit of things coming faster by say lives saved by ending aging, then, and that's, that's 60 million a year, which is less than 1% of the population each year. So if you look at the math this way, then I think there's definitely a margin on which caution actually does become favorable.
- [80:31]
Shaw Walters
What do you think the number is about four years, basically?
- [80:35]
Vitalik Buterin
Again, I have very high uncertainty and I actually don't advocate flipping the switch on reducing hardware access tomorrow. Basically. I think we need to start having concrete conversations about this. And I think if we live in the more unfavorable worlds, then more than likely before things completely go to hell, the public will start to get very worried and there will be a lot of demand for this. Right?
- [81:05]
Guillaume Verdin
A couple years ago there was like pause AI. It's like, oh, we just need a six month pause. 12 month pause. We just need 12 months, bro. We're gonna figure out alignment. And it's like it's never enough. I don't think you can forever guarantee alignment of a system that is higher complexity and has more expressivity than you can understand, period. Okay? And you gotta be comfortable with that, so you gotta. The only safety against complexity is to increase your own intelligence. Right? And the thing is, we've had technology to align entities that are far more capable and smarter than a single human, like corporations. And we call that capitalism. We align self interests in exchange of monetary value. And to me, the thing I want us to get to that is maybe more relevant to some folks in the room is how crypto could be a Coupling, right? Like, let's say you have a dollar that's backed like the USD by violence and you're trying to exchange with AIs that are delocalized across a bunch of servers. How do you ensure you trust an exchange of monetary value when it's no longer backed by violence? So maybe cryptography offers a way to. Crypto offers a way to have commerce between purely AI entities like AI corporations and hybrids or human corporations. And to me, that's kind of the most interesting alignment technology out there. Whereas just saying, like, oh, we're at a precipice of a high uncertainty, let's just stop and chill out for a bit and we'll feel better. But then in four years you're not going to want to make it happen. And so I don't think delaying anything is going to be productive. So. Well, anyway, do you have an answer to how crypto could help align potentially AIs and humans?
- [83:04]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, so I think like, yeah, the key question is basically like, what is the mechanistic property of this future world that will even cause people's wishes and needs to be respected at all? Right. And like the two tools that we have are basically. Yes. I mean, there's like people's labor, there's legal systems and there's property rights. Right. And ultimately you can think of legal systems as being a type of property, right? Because they're backed by countries. Countries have sovereignty, which is basically, you know, a property, a right of sorts over like cones of the earth. And then the question is like, people, like, the risk is basically like the, like what happens in a world where the, the economic value of people's labor goes to zero. Right? And this is something that has not happened historically. Right? But if you Compare now to 200 years ago, right. If you look at the jobs 200 years ago, right now, roughly 90% of them has been automated. Actually, one of the jobs that was automated was doing that analysis for me, like GPT did it. But it's amazing.
- [84:15]
Guillaume Verdin
I think we're just naturally, we kind of ascend the control hierarchy over the world to positions of higher leverage where there's not as much manual labor, there's less friction. We can take action in the world with less friction. I think humans are, no matter what, we still have some processing capabilities. We're still going to be useful as part of this hybrid system and there's going to be a price for our labor and the free market is going to equilibriate in some way. It's just going to Be uncomfortable for a couple of years while there's very high variance in the prices of things. But eventually the system equilibriates. Right. And so I understand trying to slow down so that we can, you know, reach that equilibrium more smoothly in principle, but I think in practice it's unenforceable.
- [85:03]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely like much like I'm less sure that human labor continuing to be worth more than zero is a default outcome. I think it's an outcome that is possible if some of these human AI merge and human augmentation technologies develop. Right.
- [85:22]
Guillaume Verdin
We should fund that.
- [85:23]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, we should.
- [85:27]
Eddie Lazarin
So that's actually a great segue point. Please allow me to ask is here's how I'll put it to both of you and we're running a little bit tight on time. Let's try to make this one tighter. Is 10 years from now, if things went really poorly, what went wrong? What does the world look like and what went wrong? If 10 years from now things go great, what does the world look like and what went great? And then apply the same thing briefly to 100 years and to a billion years.
- [86:02]
Vitalik Buterin
I think keep it short. Yeah. I mean, actually, just to answer the question about crypto first, I think that'd be great. Getting back to property rights. Right. I think it's good to work on both of those legs. And I think it would be nice if the property rights system that like humans and ideally all of us have some property on is the Same system that AIs are using with each other because that ensures that they have an interest in maintaining the integrity of the thing that it gives us that leverage to have some guarantee that our interests will be respected and acted upon. Right. So yeah, I think having emerged financial system as opposed to two totally separate things where basically the value of the human one just on the whole drops to zero. That's. Yeah. The mortgage one is much better. And if crypto can be that. That's amazing. Right. So. No, that'll be my answer.
- [87:07]
Guillaume Verdin
That's the tenure.
- [87:08]
Vitalik Buterin
Well, I think that's part of the tenure. Okay. So. Yeah, the 10. Yeah, I think the 10 year. I mean, for me it's one aspect of this is avoid World War iii. Right. I think this is important to talk about because World War III will make all of the pessimistic assumptions about international coordination being impossible. Very true. And I think avoiding World War three is important. And then the other thing is also just preparing the world and people and environments for higher capabilities that we're going to Have. And this includes greatly improving cybersecurity. This includes greatly improving biosecurity, greatly improving infosecurity. Yes, we need AI assistance that help us understands the world and fighting and protect us from memetic threats. So that's 10 years. I think the second stage there is basically what happens in the kind of spooky era, right? And in the spooky era, basically you have AIs that are smarter than any of us today and can think a million times faster than us today. And what do we do in that world? Right? And I think there are people who want to say basically like, hey, we should just all have a happy retirement. And I can see why that vision is seductive. I think it's. I find it unsatisfying for two reasons. I think one of those reasons is sort of instability, right? It's that basically, yeah, you know, we are like meatbags made up of matter that could do a million times more computation than what we're doing. And AIs will notice that. And at some point the idea that they'll stay aligned and resist that pressure forever, it feels like a risk. And also kind of the deeper thing is that I think part of being human is having a life that has meaning. And I think part of having a life that has meaning is being able to take actions that have actual consequences in the world. And so if all of us can have lives of maximum comfort, regardless of what I do, I would feel empty. And I think a lot of people feel that way. And so I hope that we figure out human AI augmentation and what that looks like ultimately. Does that lead to the same path as uploading? This is a thing that we need to figure out. There is a possible world where some people choose to remain more normal. And I think everyone should have that right. It's possible even that Earth should remain as the planet for people who take that option. And we basically figure out something that we can all participate in and that continues to be pluralistic and that continues to have the kinds of cultures that like, we even like all the actions and lives that we today would find admirable. Right. And I think the, you know, the downside world is basically a world where for any reason all of that goes, goes off the rails and is prevented from happening.
- [90:45]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah, I think, I think like the downside world in 10 years would be we suffered from over centralization of AI power. We have mode collapse in terms of our memetics or cultures that are allowed, what you're allowed to think in terms of the Space of technology essentially entropy collapse in terms of every parameter space.
- [91:03]
Vitalik Buterin
So you're saying you're worried that instead of climbing the Kardashev scale, we'll climb the Kardashian scale.
- [91:12]
Shaw Walters
Waiting for that all day.
- [91:14]
Guillaume Verdin
Well, exactly like I think, I think your point on like the hedonic singularity as being a risk. People would just, even if you have neural links or AR VR, people could just goon forever in some room and just maximizing pleasure. And that's a local optimum for your brain and that's something we want to avoid. I think optimistically in 10 years we have extremely powerful AI that's extremely helpful to us. We have have personalized AI compute. That's an extension of our cognition that we control and own. And it truly is an extension of ourself. It's just another part of your brain. Right. And it has always on perception, it's see and hears everything you see in here and you could talk to it. So it's just like right and left hemisphere. I think that's the soft merge. I think in 10 years Neuralink like technology is going to start really emerging. Some people are going to choose to, to adopt it. Yeah, I do think most companies are going to be extremely hybrid, mostly AI sim. Humans are going to be far more companies. We're going to do far more, we're going to produce far more value, we're going to do much harder things. There's a lot of hard things out there that we mentally walled off. We can't do those. Oh yeah. Oh, terraforming Mars. Too hard? Yeah, no, not doable. But with more intelligence we'll be able to do that. Not on 10 year, on a 100 year time scale possibly, yes. I think in 10 years there's going to be a huge bunch of biological breakthroughs. Peptides are kind of like an interesting new area. But there's, I mean there's a whole floor here on next gen biotech. You should go talk to them. I think optimistically we see the cost of making discoveries in biology going down. The opposite of Eroom's Law. Right. Eroom's law is like Moore's law in reverse for biology. The cost of any discovery there going up exponentially. And so to me I think naturally white collar work is like distilling a human brain. We're getting there. The next frontier of complexity is biology. The next frontier after that is material science. And so I think the next frontier is going to be AI helping us live longer, healthier lives on a hundred and billion Year timescale, it's going to steer our evolution. Right. I am very bullish on the biological substrate, despite what people think. I do think silicon has some advantages. But biology is amazing. We're like, it's this self assembling, self organizing piece of matter. We just like, you know, inject a bit of code and then there you spawn and then you complexify over time and you are a biological general intelligence.
- [93:48]
Vitalik Buterin
Do you think it's possible to get biological intelligence like us to think at 10,000 tokens a second?
- [93:55]
Guillaume Verdin
Potentially, yeah. I mean at the same time
- [94:00]
Vitalik Buterin
you
- [94:00]
Guillaume Verdin
can hybridize several models. You can have pipeline parallelism between your brain and AI. You can be kind of the slow thinking mode. Right. Like right now we are the slow thinking modes in latent space and vibe space. That's what vibe coding is. And then the deconvolution is like the AI. I think that's a nice sort of timescale separation of the. There's a hierarchy of intelligence and we can be part of a system just like mitochondria are part of a cell. Our brains are going to be part of the super intelligent system that is you, plus your personal AI. I think that's the good future. I think in 100 years it's going to be. Everyone is going to be soft merged like that. And in a billion years our biology is going to have evolved quite a bit. We might be biosynthetic hybrids. We're definitely going to have terraformed Mars, several planets, maybe access to other stars. I think on a 100 year timescale we're definitely going to have. Most AI is going to be in the Dyson swarm around the sun because that's the source of energy. Elon knows that. He's all in on that vision and accelerating that timeline. It relieves a lot of stress for energy and footprint on Earth. So it's a natural way forward. But if we have extremely cheap intelligence, we're going to be able to one shot any problem we have in our lives, right? Like oh, I have a bug solved, oh I have this health problem solved. What else do you want? That's amazing. That's amazingly good. We're going to have more of that cheaper and we just got to make sure everyone has access to it and no one convinces you you shouldn't have access to it and centralizes it because that's the dark future. So that's what it's all about. Hopefully the discussion today, you know, got people thinking.
- [95:43]
Shaw Walters
Yeah, I noticed something like a powerful theme between you which Is like Vitalik, you're arguing for enabling plurality, I would say. And you would say almost the same thing of maximizing variance, so to speak. And that seems to be like the central through line of where we're going and like the top down from where a lot of the other like views come from. I love that. So we, we've been doing this for a while. It's been amazing. I, I think we're going to have to wrap it up. I, I want to leave this just on like you know, this has been for us. But I would love if you guys continue to have a conversation after this. You're obviously connected now. What is something that you would each like to kind of leave for each other and for. And for us obviously, but really for each other. Like walking away from this, kind of chewing on thinking about as we leave this place, unfortunately.
- [96:32]
Vitalik Buterin
Yeah, if I actually had one, I actually would have loved to just give you one of the cat as a gift. It's the air quality monitor that does cryptography. I think it's a super cool device. But how about I will give it to you metaphorically and it's an IOU and potentially we'll have a much better thing like this and maybe even something that can out compete Fitbit watches and do amazing things for your health and do it all privately and you will get it quite soon.
- [97:03]
Guillaume Verdin
Yeah, we'll keep chatting. I think I want to artificial life pill you Artificial life on the network. I think it could definitely drive the cost of intelligence down. It could be an economy. We've outsourced manufacturing to China, allowed us to go to higher levels, different types of jobs that are more comfortable, higher leverage. Maybe a lot of cognitive work where the outsourced to the swarm of AIs. Eventually it's going to live on the dice and swarm and so on. I think there's a unique opportunity right now. Crypto is going to be the coupling between AI and humans. I truly believe that. How else are you going to build trust between species? And I think we need to start thinking about that really thoughtfully. So maybe that's. We're going to keep chatting about that. Awesome.
- [97:52]
Shaw Walters
Incredible. Thank you guys so much for.
- [97:54]
Eddie Lazarin
Thank you very much.
- [97:57]
Podcast Narrator
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our subscribers substack@a16z.substack.com thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.