Vitalik Buterin Says Developers Should ‘Tread Carefully’ Mixing Crypto and AI

AI
has
stolen
some
of
crypto’s
luster
over
the
past
year:
a
Silicon
Valley
obsessed
with
Web3
and
the
Metaverse
seems
to
have
turned
its
attention
entirely
towards

large
language
models
and
apps
like
ChatGPT.

Some
blockchain
projects
have
tried
to
take
advantage
of
the
new
AI
hype,
but
while
crypto

startups
like
Worldcoin,
the
identity
firm
from
OpenAI
founder
Sam
Altman,
have
found
use
cases
that
straddle
both
worlds,
many
AI-flavored
crypto
projects
tend
to
feel
like
they’re
more
buzz
than
substance.

Whatever
the
potential
pitfalls,
according
to
Ethereum
co-founder
Vitalik
Buterin,
the
intersection
between
crypto
and
AI
still
holds
promise.
In
a

blog
post
released
on
Tuesday,
Buterin
delivered
his
thoughts
on
where
crypto
and
AI
tech
might
collide
in
the
coming
years,
though
he
also
took
care
to
warn
that
there
might
be
challenges.

Using
the
analogy
of
a
“game,”
Buterin
divided
the
potential
overlaps
between
AI
and
blockchain
into
four
distinct
categories.

The
most
“viable”
category,
according
to
Buterin,
contains
applications
where
AI
acts
as
“a
player
in
a
game.”
At
a
high
level,
this
category
captures
apps
where
“the
ultimate
source
of
the
incentives
comes
from
a
protocol
with
human
inputs.”
An
example
of
this
would
be
a
prediction
market:
AI
can
be
used
to
predict
the
outcome
of
a
given
event,
and
a
blockchain-based
mechanism
can
enforce
the
rules
around
how
much
the
AI
(or
the
person
operating
it)
should
be
rewarded
or
penalized
based
on
its
guess.

The
next
category,
which
Buterin
tags
as
“high
potential,
but
with
high
risks,”
includes
applications
where
AI
acts
as
an
“interface
to
the
game.”
In
these
applications,
AI
is
used
to
help
users
“understand
the
crypto
world
around
them”
and
ensure
their
behavior
“matches
their
intentions.”
Buterin
gives
the
example
of
scam-detection
features,
like
the
one
used
in
the
MetaMask
crypto
wallet
to
warn
users
if
they
might
be
interacting
with
a
deceptive
application.
Such
features
could
be
“super-charged”
by
AI’s
enhanced
detection
and
explanatory
capabilities.

The
third
category
defined
by
Buterin
describes
apps
where
AI
dictates
the
“rules
of
the
game.”
“Think
‘AI
judges,'”
he
explained,
warning
that
one
should
“tread
very
carefully”
when
exploring
this
problem
space.
An
obvious
crypto
use-case
here
would
be
to
help
DAOs,
or
decentralized
autonomous
organizations,
make
subjective
decisions
using
AI.

Buterin’s
fourth
category
for
the
potential
intermarriage
of
AI
and
crypto
includes
use
cases
where
AI
is
the
“objective
of
the
game.”
This
“longer-term”
category
involves
using
blockchains
as
infrastructure
for
building
better
AI
models.

While
Buterin
says
he
is
more
optimistic
than
he
once
was
about
the
intersections
between
AI
and
crypto,
he
does
see
potential
challenges
with
balancing
the
transparency
of
crypto
with
the
customary
opaqueness
of
“black
box”
AI
systems:
“In
cryptography,
open
source
is
the
only
way
to
make
something
truly
secure,
but
in
AI,
a
model
(or
even
its
training
data)
being
open
greatly
increases
its
vulnerability
to
adversarial
machine
learning
attacks.”

At
the
end
of
his
post,
Buterin
issues
a
warning
to
developers:
“It
is
worth
treading
carefully.”