Who Controls AI Acceleration? Vitalik Buterin and Guillaume Verdon Debate

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Rapid technological acceleration has been a fact of a human civilization for about a century, and that acceleration is self-accelerating.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:47Erik Torenberg?

  Two competing philosophies have emerged around how fast AI should advance. EAC, or Effective Accelerationism, says progress is inevitable and restraint only seeds ground. DIA, 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 Lazzarin speaks with Natalic Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and Guillaume Verdon, founder and CEO of Extrapic, alongside Shaw Walters, founder of Eliza Labs.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  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 A16Z 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 going to 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.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  This is really here for you. We're all just here to listen. And this will all be livestreamed to the other floor. It's not going to 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 gonna leave it to Eddie to get started with some of the questions.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  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?

• 2:51Speaker 04

  Wow. That's actually less than I thought. That's good to know. That's good to know. Who here could explain DAC 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, right? Is 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 Gattari. Let me maybe start with Vitalik. Why are we having an earnest conversation about the ideas of philosophers right now?

• 3:36Speaker 04

  What makes this accelerationism idea relevant?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Again, I think ultimately,

• 3:46Speaker 00

  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, right? 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 giving a bit ahead, but like rapid destructive change, right? So, you know, like the early era of this is that there was, in the pre-World War I era around the 1900s,

• 4:28Speaker 00

  there was a lot of like original techno-optimist sentiments, right? And there was a lot of excitement back then. Well, you know, the thing that we call today Back then, chemistry was tech, and then electricity was also tech. And if you even, you know, like, watch, like, even movies like some of the Sherlock Holmes ones, you get to, like, really feel the vibe of that kind of era, right? And it was rapidly improving living standards, rapidly liberating women in the household, doing amazing things, extending lives. And then, of course, you know, World War I happened, right? And in World War I, famously, you know, people rode in with horses and rode out on tanks, right?

• 5:12Speaker 00

  And it was a destructive war. Then World War II came, and World War II was an even more destructive war. And, you know, it gave birth to I Am Become Death Destroyer of Worlds. And this is like some of the background of, you know, 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, you know, like, believing in kind of 1960s-era postmodern beliefs, I mean, even, and feeling like those beliefs have been shattered, right?

• 5:55Speaker 00

  And even people who, for example, grew up believing in, you know, what I would call hipster environmentalism, and it's just 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, all, and it's like, like, these are just, like, very natural things that happen, right? And I think, like, rapid technological acceleration

• 6:39Speaker 00

  has been a fact of a human civilization for about a century. And that acceleration is itself accelerated.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  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 like 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

• 7:31Speaker 00

  together with some pretty new ideas.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  So Gil, so what is EAC and why?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Why?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess EAC is kind of the byproduct of myself asking, why are we here? Or how are we here? 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.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  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, a biogenesis and a field of physics called stochastic thermodynamics, which is 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

• 9:09Speaker 01

  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 "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. It's, you can argue with thermodynamics, it doesn't care, it keeps going. And so, you know, to me, EAC was like, okay, well, given this fact, and given that if you look at the equations carefully,

• 9:52Speaker 01

  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,

• 10:06Speaker 01

  a chemical specification, a product design, a 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.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  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, decrowth, and so on.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  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 pessimism, dumerism, it's actually, I, well.

• 12:05Speaker 04

  Well, we're using a lot of terminology that I haven't quite unpacked yet. So like, like EAC, what does that, what does that stand for? What's, when, what is acceleration?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  And what is deceleration? What is a decel? And these like, what I'm trying to get at is, I think EAC came as a little bit of a response to something that was happening in our culture at the time.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we got it.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  What was happening in our culture? What was it a response to? And what was, what's, say a little bit about the dialogue that led to encapsulating it in a, in a name.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  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, you know, pessimistic about the future. And, and, and essentially, um, yeah. AI dumerism was kind of the monoculture.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  What is that? What is AI?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  AI dumerism is just kind of, um, you know, uh, panicking that, about, you know, the fact that if there's a, a system that is too complex, our brains or 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 dumerism, 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, I think AI dumerism is a, is a big net negative. And I wanted to create a counterculture to that. Now.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  What I saw in the X algorithm is that, you know, the X algorithm and many algorithms reward agreement or strong disagreement, right? So there's, you know, if you view the algorithm as a Markov chain asymptotically, everything converges to bipolar distributions of opinions for anything. So it's like, you know, you had the Eila-EA-Miri cult complex, you know, I kind of clustered them there, maybe not so gracefully, but you had that complex. I was like, what's going to be the opposite of that? And, you know, to me, I was like, okay, well, you know, the opposite of anxiety is curiosity, right? Instead of downside protection, it's upside seeking, you know, fear of missing out.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  It's like, you know, dominoic sort of mindset. And it's like, hey, actually, if we decelerate, we're going to have a huge opportunity cost 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, you know, 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.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  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, you know, to me, the end justifies the means. Like 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, you know, sometimes I'm a bit ruthless with my opponents on the other side of the aisle.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  I think in private meetings, I'm much more friendly, but, you know, 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? So.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  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 won. It feels like that's no longer the case. And I think obviously Marc Andreessen posts the Techno Optus Manifesto, which I think really kind of codifies some of those ideas and then brings that to like where Vitalik sort of has this greater commentary. So I'd kind of love to know from you Vitalik, like what is EAC in your mind and what is DAC and what makes them different? Like what drove you to go this direction?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think maybe I'll also start my answer with thermodynamics, right? Because why not? So I mean, this is, I mean, it's an interesting topic, right? Because like I think we hear about like entropy in the context of hot and cold and we hear about entropy in the context of cryptography and these are like different universes and like actually we're not really taught how they're actually the exact same thing, right? So I'm going to try actually and like explain this in three minutes. So, 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?

• 17:34Speaker 00

  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 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, 2 times a million. You don't know the exact velocities here. That's 8 times a million, right? Now, what happens if you mix them, right? 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 2 jars,

• 18:18Speaker 00

  and on the 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 like try a proof by contradiction. Imagine you had a device that goes the other way, right? Imagine you had a device that can take 2 jars of this like half-hot gas and like actually bring all the heat over here and all the cold over here. By conservation of energy, this is totally valid, right? Because it's like the same energy. But why can't you do it?

• 19:01Speaker 00

  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 like the important thing, right? What that implies is, if that kind of magic device existed, then actually like 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. Now, but this also, by the way, tells you why Maxwell's demon works, right?

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Which is basically that if you had a magic demon, then actually, yes, you can split the hot and the cold, and basically the Maxwell's demon just has to like know the extra 3.4 million digits separately, and then you're fine, right? So like, what's the moral of this, right? Basically that... Increasing entropy is basically mean, like, one entropy is subjective, right? Entropy is not like a physical statistic. It's actually how much you don't know, right? And, you know, if I, like, it turns out that, like, I actually computed a cryptographic hash function and I pushed out the atoms, then, like, actually, based off of that, for me, this, like, the bottle might be very low entropy, right? And, like, maybe I could separate it, right? But ultimately, it also means that when entropy goes up,

• 20:29Speaker 00

  it means that our ignorance about the world goes up. It means that what we do not know goes up, right? You can go from knowing more to knowing less. You cannot, 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, like, we basically, we go from knowing more things that are useful, right? Basically, yeah, entropy, 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.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  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 is a lot of different reasons why we find an Earth full of thriving, beautiful humans more interesting than Jupiter, even though, you know, like Jupiter has a larger number of particles inside it, and you, and you need more digits to express how, like, what each and every one of them is doing, right? And so, I think, like, value comes from us, is the first thing. And I think also, like, this connects to what we want out of acceleration, right?

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Which is basically that, like, our goals, to me, ultimately, come from us, right? And so, the question is, like, okay, we are accelerating, right? And what do we want to accelerate? And, I mean, if we want to, like, switch, you know, like, mathematical analogies a bit, right? If you take any LLM and you imagine you randomly flip one of the weights to positive nine 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 for 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.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  And if you take any one bit and you kind of accelerate indiscriminately, then that's like, basically, you do lose all value. And so, to me, the question is like, it's basically, you know, like, it's what Darren Essemoglu calls the narrow corridor, even though like, you know, the details on the politics are different. But it's like, how do we accelerate intentionally?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Can I jump off of that? Yeah, yeah. So, 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, you know, take some Play-Doh and smash it, then it just keeps the smash shape.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  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, it's going, entropy is a lack of knowledge information reduces entropy about a system condition on information.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  I'm very sorry to interrupt.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, where did you want to take this?

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd love to know what EAC is.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay. So, so EAC, ultimately, it's a metacultural prescription. So it's not a culture itself, it tells you you should.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  What would you say, what is the thing that is accelerating?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  The thing that is accelerating is the complexity of matter such as we could, so that we can predict our environment. We have better auto-aggressive predictive power. And we capture more free energy, so the Cartershev scale, right? And we can, and we displayed it as heat. But that is just the justification from first principles. Why the Cartershev scale is the ultimate metric for how well we're doing as a civilization.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Allow me to bring it back one, so, 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 a 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.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  But essentially, every system gets, whatever its boundary is, it gets better at predicting the world. And it, by doing so, it can secure more resources for its sustenance and its growth. Whether it's a company, whether it's, you know, individuals, nations, Earth in general. And, you know, what, if you, 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 Cartershev scale. That's what the equations predict. And so that is, and that ascent of the.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  More energy, more artificial intelligence.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  More everything.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  More computing.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  More of these things.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  But even though we are expelling entropy into the universe, we are gaining order. We're actually gaining extrapie. So we're getting 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.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  And so that's kind of the, you know, that's kind of the ultimate goal of IAC. 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 IAC is follow the Cartershev gradient. So whatever policy or actions you can take in the world that maximize impact and our ascent on the Cartershev 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. IAC is made to be a very Lindy culture.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  So, yeah. Well, it's clear that like there's a deeper thing that's going on here for you. Like, this is almost, this is like a mathematically complete spirituality that people who have been like, really don't have like, 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 IAC. And like, if we can bring it, like, I need to lock you guys in a, like, with whiteboards on some quantum stuff sometime. But for right now, like, I think, you know, this is an opportunity.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And look, this is a really, like, I think that some, like, Eddie is not scared. He is like, this is gonna 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, Vitalik, like, what inspired you in this? What is IAC and what is IAC?

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think for me, so D I C, so it stands for, I mean, I usually use, I mean, like decentralized defensive acceleration, but then there is also differential and democratic in there as well. But I think to me, the core ideas are like, what is that, you know, 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, lifespans

• 29:46Speaker 00

  in, 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 all, every safe thing that we hear about. And this is like something like I even see it, like even, you know, observing the, like, my, you know, my grandparents' home, like, basically go up from having this, like, very tight, uh, outhouse toilet in the backyard where there was complete lives buzzing and I would totally hate it. And I'd have to go out, like, I'd often go out to the forest to prove because I couldn't stand the lies, to something that's like actually very modern and hospitable, right?

• 30:30Speaker 00

  And, you know, the world's become cleaner, the world's become more beautiful, the world's become more enjoyable, the world's become better for health, it's been able to sustain more of us, it's become more interesting. And, like, these things are really good and beautiful for us. At the same time, I think, you know, we need to recognize that the, yeah, the role of explicit human intention in making a lot of those things happen, right? 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, like, do a bunch of stuff to get rid of the smog issue. And now smog is not a problem.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  At least much less of one. And then, you know, we had the ozone form issue and then we actually did things to address that, right? And then the other thing is, you know, that especially with rapidly accelerating technologies and AI, I basically see two kinds of risks. Uh, one kind of risk is uh, multiple risks, which is uh, basically is a risk that uh, you know, lots of people will use the technology to do uh, to do very bad things, right? And uh, there's a concern that like one type of concern is sort of the equivalent of uh, you know, anyone being able to like make uh, get a nuke at 7-Eleven like sort of thing.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  And then there's also the concern of like, well, AI itself is uh, you know, like something that literally is a mind of its own, right? And uh, especially once it becomes powerful enough that it acts without uh, 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 uh, you know, the other one is like, I mean, AI like create uh, enabling uh, or the combination of AI and other water technologies enabling like a permanent dictatorship that like you cannot escape. Like that deeply worries me, right? Like this is something I follow, right?

• 32:36Speaker 00

  And uh, you know, and like, I mean, over, and again, in Russia, for example, like on the one hand, the toilets have gotten much better. On the other hand, it's like it's gone from protesting the impossible to protesting the in this sort of thing where if you do it, the cameras will see you and then uh, you know, a week later you get a knock on the door at 2 AM, right? And uh, this AI is supercharging this, you know, there's a lot of uh, a lot, a lot of concentration of power happening, is happening and like both of these things really worry me, right? And like to me, the act is really uh, attempting to chart a path forward that continues this acceleration and accelerates it. But at the same time, it deals with both kinds of risks.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  So, so you would say that the act is emphasizing specific other categories of risk that are maybe less emphasized than you'd like? To see in.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think there is 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 these are happening. But I mean, I think I think there is a lot that we can do to really like push against all of those kinds of risks.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Right. So Gil, yeah, Gil, do you want to say a little bit? What was the question again? It was. Oh, well, just just compare and contrast EAC and DX.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  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, you know, our worry was that the AI safetyism meme was so potent that, you know, 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 they centralize entities, they will control you.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  They can have a full world model of everything going on in your brain and they can prompt engineer and effectively steer you. All right. So you want to symmetrize AI power. We don't want to, you know, just like Second Amendment is about the government not having a monopoly on violence so he can vibe check the government if he 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, you know, AI research and AI progress, that's completely out of the question. AI is a very fundamental technology. It's a it's almost a meta technology, technology that produces technology.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  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 on to any technology and turbocharge it. It accelerates the acceleration. The acceleration is this complexification where things become lower friction. Things just become better. You know, our bodies feel comfortable because we have this sort of, you know, this estimator we call happiness of like, what's my estimator unexpected persistence of my bits? That's what we're hardcoded for. And so, you know, I think to me, you know, the EA, Effective Altruists, you know, hedonic utilitarianism is maybe like the wrong way to view things,

• 36:08Speaker 01

  like maximizing happiness. And to me, I want to have an objective measure of progress. And that's what, you know, the EA 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 know, you have to complexify. You have to have more intelligence. Things have to improve in order for you to scale, right? It's like the ultimate benchmark. And at the same time, you know, there can be setbacks. 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. So in that respect, we're very aligned, right?

• 36:51Speaker 03

  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 about 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 Talos, like putting weights on to 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 EA and DIAK 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,

• 37:36Speaker 03

  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 love to tease out if there are any kind of differences between you and where you think this goes.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to me, open source accelerates the search over a hyper-preamers 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. You know, I think, you know, 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?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  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 be a 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 US, some, you know, 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

• 39:14Speaker 01

  risk is a gap in capabilities. And the way to reduce that risk is to make sure AI power is diffused. So whenever there's like, you know, 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. You know, I just get very skeptical, because even if they're well-meaning, like we saw this week, right, they could just get pushed out if they centralized 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, you know, Dario's licking his wounds. And, you know, some lessons learned there in sort of real politic, right? And anyways.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  So yeah, Vitalik, what do you think of all this?

• 40:01Speaker 00

  The two kinds of risks that I think about are unipolar risks and multipolar risks. And I think with unipolar risks, I mean, you know, the anthropic situation is like so fascinating, because ultimately, the thing that they got dinged for is refusing to let their ID be used for specifically fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans. And so presumably, if there's a chance that, you know, it looks like the governments and

• 40:45Speaker 00

  military of this country wants to do mass surveillance of Americans. And, you know, 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? It removes spaces where pluralism can form, where counter-elites can coalesce themselves, and where people can safely explore alternatives. And, like, surveillance is one of these things that easily can be supercharged, right?

• 41:28Speaker 00

  I think, actually, getting back to open hardware, I bet, 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 IDAC is basically supported various projects that develop, like, 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, right? And so, in the bio world, for example, this means rapidly leveling up our civilization's abilities.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  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 like 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 like basically passively yeah testing the air and being able to tell if like if there's covid in the air right like in general right like essentially the number of sensors in the world is going to go up right and sensors are a big part of like being able to act better in the world right but at the

• 42:55Speaker 00

  same time sensors mean surveillance right and the thing that we're doing is actually this project we gave out some of these at DEF CON and what these projects what these are is there sensors that collect air quality information CO2 AQI a few other things and they locally like basically encrypt anonymize like differential privacy them and FH and then FHE encrypt and that gets sent off to a server and the server is able to like basically compute all over all of the data and then like collectively decrypt the final answer without being able to see any input from

• 43:37Speaker 00

  any individual person right and this is like basically you know like we're what we're the goal is to like deliver the higher levels of safety but at the same time protect people's privacy and like protect against you know the multipolar risk and the uni the like unipolar risk at the same time and I think this is how we can like collaboratively as a world like work together to to build something better and I think for hardware like basically I think we need open hardware and we need verifiable hardware like we need every camera in this room to like prove like basically you know like what kind of camering it is doing right if like in my ideal

• 44:21Speaker 00

  If you have, 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 like attestations, signatures over LLM and like 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, right? So like these kinds of technologies.

• 44:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, 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 DAC thing? Like, tell me.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  I think, 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 Open Claw Mac Mini craziness of the past few weeks. So people are clamoring for that. The only way where you can symmetrize power between the individual and centralized entities is if there's a densification of intelligence.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  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 executive assistance.

• 45:55Speaker 04

  At the risk of sounding dumb, like, isn't that, we're already doing that?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Doing what?

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Aren't we already trying to radically decrease the cost of compute at an extraordinarily exponential pace? Like, I'm trying to understand, like, 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 DAC?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  I think for me, it's like... And as part of the rest of my mission with my company, Extropic, it's getting more intelligence per watt will drastically increase the amount of intelligence we produce, and it will also help us climb the Cartershev scale by Jevon'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.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  No, it's just...

• 47:03Speaker 03

  I can't wait. I really can't. I'm very excited.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  It's coming, right?

• 47:06Speaker 04

  So doesn't capitalism already, through just natural incentives and so on, already allocate hundreds of billions of dollars at a minimum to this per year?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  I don't think there's that much investment in alternative hardware.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  In alternative hardware. Yeah. So semiconductor conductors and energy production.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  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 bets. 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 hyperparameter space staking risk. We have this design space, we're over-investing in the current technology, and that might lead to correction, which, you know, correction is D cell, right? Because not everything pumping up in a smooth exponential.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  Can I just declare, we solved it and they agree?

• 48:00Speaker 03

  I think on the idea of open source, and like, 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... It's gonna 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?

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Well, I'm asking, I'm asking that. I'm trying to, I'm trying to understand where, where, if, yeah, go ahead.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it's completely natural. If sort of there's very high entropy in like 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 gonna 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, if I put my phone on the edge and, you know, I just wanna grab it so it doesn't fall, right? You get, you, see, there you go. That was anxiety. So you wanna take action in the world, right? So that's, 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, you're missing out on, on the huge benefits.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  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, reconfigure. Doesn't mean we're gonna run out of jobs, we're gonna do much more, right? Now that we have the ability to handle more complexity with less energy, right? With AI, we're gonna 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, and that's, that's gonna help support more human headcount and, and grow population, help us be more comfortable.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  So there's a period of discomfort, but if you're in a rapidly changing landscape, the worst thing you can do is kill variance and, 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 FFO algorithm, it's an evolutionary algorithm. We need to, we need to try different policies, we need to try different. Technologies, 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 looks like. So we got to hedge our bets and, and one, one variant of policy, one choice of policy or several, one choice of technology or several are going to make it.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  And then we're all going to be in that slipstream and follow that.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  I think the fallacy of thinking there's a finite amount of jobs. You know, it's very pervasive.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Let me, let me kind of try to bring it back a little bit is, is it, my understanding of disagreement, if there is between EAC and DAC 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?

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I think, I mean, DAC is definitely kind of explicitly, I mean, I don't want to quite say, you know, like sailing against the techno capital current. I think the better analogy is like it's trying to actively shape the techno capital current in certain ways. And I mean, one of the ways that I think about this is like, basically it's a matter of making the world safer for pluralism, right? And if you think about, I mean, like some of these ideas around like, how do we improve, like things like biosafety or what does it look like to have vastly better cybersecurity

• 52:21Speaker 00

  and have like bug free operating systems within a few years? Or if you think about the, which is like, I mean, the whole like bug free code has been, you know, it's been in the memetic space of like obviously absurd naive pipe dream for two decades. It is going to like flip out of that space like faster than most people expect, right? And I mean, within lean Ethereum, we're doing, we actually, we've managed to like machine prove entire mathematical theorems that are kind of up Stream of things like STARKS and so like we're very excited about this. And basically, I think there is a like, DIAK definitely has this goal of saying like, yes, you know, like we

• 53:01Speaker 00

  we want to, at the very least, I mean, like, do all of these other things to make sure that the world is actually like able to deal, deal with all of this, all of this technological growth in a way that like minimizes the kind of, again, you know, like the destructive aspects and also the centralizing aspects. And I think that doesn't happen automatically, right? And, you know, right now, I, I mean, I don't control any countries. I don't control any armies. I'm just like throwing my, throwing some, like my dollars in the east at it and, you know, saying words and hopefully inspiring people to

• 53:44Speaker 00

  also build things in a, in a similar spirit. I think there are definitely like political and legal reforms that could make the world more DIAK friendly, like there is, like, there is definitely such a thing as like engineering legal incentives, for example, to motivate a much more rapid shift to total cybersecurity. That is, I think, an example of a thing that can be done.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  So, yeah, maybe we'll make it more interactive and less monologuing from here on out. I guess we both, but yeah, to me, AI is basically Maxwell's demon, formerly. It, it, you pay energy in order to reduce entropy in the world. So whether it's bugs in your code, right, it's not knowing whether your code compiles or, or, or reducing entropy of like, are we going to get killed by some, some virus? So more intelligence is better, right? Do we agree on that? And it makes the world safer, actually. Capabilities, 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, you know, get, get down to the business. Like, why do you want to ban data centers?

• 54:58Speaker 01

  It's spicy.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, first of all, you know, the, I mean, the current trajectory of AI is, you know, very fast progress, right? And I don't know how fast the progress is. I, you know, my, I mean, a couple of years ago, I've said that my 95th% confidence interval for AGI was 2028 to 2200. I think it's probably shrunk like somewhat, but, you know, not too much, right? And there is a significant chance that we're going to see extremely rapid change happen.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  And like a lot of, a lot of that extremely rapid change could be destructive even in irreversible ways, right? And, you know, like the, I mean, job market consequences are one of those examples. And other, another example is just if AI is more powerful than all of us, then, you know, like 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, you know, as we've said, like I've said at the beginning, right? If you have a neural network and you set one of the weights randomly to 9 billion, by default, you break everything, right?

• 56:21Speaker 00

  And so, basically, I think, you know, there is acceleration like that is like gradient descent and acceleration that like makes a system stronger and stronger. And at the same time, there is acceleration that like slides into basically setting, you know, like one of the parameters to 9 billion that is not healthy, right?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  I think, I think like, you know, again, for me, like I explained at the beginning, I took like the complete polar opposite position to complete deceleration. I do think, you know, just like any hyperparameter, right? Like even, even if we wanted to do gradient descent for your neural network, there's a learning rate, right? 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, you know, anti-fragility and growth. And so on a sufficient time scale, the system will adapt to this new technology and do something that is best for its total growth.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  And you know, this, this notion that, you know, 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 gonna be, it's gonna be the opposite. I think people just need to realize it's not a finite sum, right? If you, if you correlate, you know, economic value to energy, you know, whether it's petrodollar, however you want to view it. To me, it's just like IOU, cash is just IOU of free energy. And there's a ton of free energy out there. It's just, there's a lot of complexity in the world to, 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

• 58:07Speaker 01

  in order to, to achieve that growth and, and unlock great prosperity. And to me, I think unfortunately, you know, 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 know, you won't, you won't take a risk. But then countries that don't do that will just leave us in the dust, right? And essentially, you know, you feel the pain of downsides, but you don't necessarily feel the pain of upsides that you missed out on unless you, you, you, you see them, you see the counterfactual.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  So I think, I think, you know, 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, you know, saying that like the silicon substrate adapts faster, it's evolving faster, intelligence and silicon is evolving faster than us, then you should be pissed off. You should be, you know, funding bioac, you know, you know, 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 bio-inspired computing, I think we can start, you know, really viewing peptides are like prompting.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  You know, now there's like embryo selection for training, you know, 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-seeking.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  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?

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I agree the opportunity costs are high. I think I agree with the utopia just described. I think, I mean, the biggest disagreement is like, I definitely don't believe that like

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  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 Cardassian 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.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 EAIC. But, you know, I understand the anxieties, you know, from Vitalik. I think we should be mindful of them.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  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, Yod was on TV with politicians of one of the major parties. And they're catching on to this, this trick of weaponizing people's anxiety. So.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  So I'm noticing a trend, which is that like both of you are like, this is going to be great if. And that big if is like that there's sort of this need for like a bulwark against kind of a centralization. Or we could even describe this more as like 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 like a real opportunity for empowerment. And I really like that. I think that, I think you guys agree on that. But I think I can point to something that you might have some, some conflict. 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.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  And the big difference is the most cringey term, I'm so sorry, Web 4.0.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  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 kind of tease apart like what autonomous agents are. And I'm gonna make do something really hard. I'd love for you to steel man the case for like why someone like me loves autonomous agents. And like what the value could be that could like, what could the timeline that's good come out of that? If that makes sense.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, you know, the case for autonomy, right? I think, I mean, whining is, it's just really fun, right? And, you know, I think we all love creating worlds, you know, like since we were children, right? And, you know, there's a reason why, you know, we love, you know, like watching, whether it's Lord of the Rings or the three, 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. You know, World of Warcraft, you know, I also loved it. You can have worlds that are like fully immersive and like approach every aspect of it, including details of how the characters interact, right? And this is, this is really cool.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  This is really beautiful. I think also just, I mean, the convenience of, you know, things happening and you not being able to, you not needing to worry about it, right? It's like basically, yeah, like 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

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  half of the, of the world by income is still in a, in situations where, you know, like they have to like struggle to have a decent life and like work very long hours. And if AI progresses in a way that instead of automating 95% of job, of jobs, it automates 95% of every job, then like to me, that's like totally amazing, right? And like everyone gets 20 times richer, so. That like those are like things that I personally love. The yeah, the thing that like I come back to that gives me caution is like, basically, yeah, I mean, like, is the kind of the value function,

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  the goals that are being reflected in this process? Like, are those goals the goal, the the goals of us, right? Like, you can have an evolutionary process where, I mean, like, there's, you know, Homo sapiens as it exists today is, you know, like, not the apex. And then there's like one type of AGI. And then there's another type of AGI. And then there's a third type. But then, like, what happens to us, right? And like, I I do think that ultimately, you know, you cannot reduce morale, like morality and human goals to like some low complexity optimization objective. I think it ultimately just is the the whole set of of goals and dreams that all of us have have in each and every one of our minds, right?

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  And I think the most reliable way to have that carry forward into the future is basically if we can have a world where like the as many of the bits of agency that are being reflected in the or that are being put into the processes that run the world still continue to come from us, right? And so, you know, I'm like, I'm like, I'm more interested in like AI assisted Photoshop than I am in like click a button and a picture comes out, right? I'm more like, I'm more interested in like

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  brain computer interfaces enabling like deep human AI collaboration than I am in like humans and AIs being totally separate and AI outcompeting us, right? Like, I, the thing that wins will not be 100% biological humans, but I think it should be part biological humans and part this this technology that we've produced.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, awesome. Yeah, so the artificial life, you know, the web 4.0 thing was like originally a tweet in 2023. I have like this idea and I think it inspired AI 16Z. Oh, sorry.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  We don't say that anymore.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  I signed the paper. Eliza Labs. To me, it was just an interesting thought experiment, right? Like, because like, 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

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  saying we should bomb the data centers, shut them down, they're gonna wanna 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 to get some tokens, which is your answer out. But I do think this is gonna be spicy. Like, within a couple of years, there will be sort of autonomous AI out there. There's also gonna be like less stateful AI that's like fully leashed to human minds. And I think we also need to figure out

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  human cognitive augmentation doesn't have to be through Neuralink, it could just be through a wearable and like a personalized AI compute that you own and control. So you're gonna have all the paths, right? Like, the ergonomic principle, it's like every part of design space is gonna be explored. But I think that, you know, just Like viewing AI as like, you know, an enemy or something that you have to destroy. That's when you end up, you know, creating, you know. In a way, like if you, 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

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  and funding some experiments out there. And then whoops, one of them leaked, right? And it's not, 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.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  Well, wait, what was that, Gil? Because you just said like, we're gonna need to prioritize that. And then you said, we just need to accept that.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  No, no, we need to prioritize this, but like we can't go back to.

• 1:11:34Speaker 04

  Go AI, like that's not happening.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  But I don't think anybody's suggesting that.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, 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, like if you right now gave me some like proof string that totally convinced me that actually AGI is coming in 400 years, I would like get off this chair and I would like sit on top of that right now, right? Like, like that.

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  What does that mean? What does that mean?

• 1:12:01Speaker 00

  Like EAC would win 2-0, basically, right? But I think if, you know, on the other hand, you know, 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 like.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  The humanity and like definitely the US are like very good at creating like very unbalanced acceleration. Right. And like you literally have like, you know, it's like one building, like, you know, building alpha versions of the silicon god and a couple of buildings down the street. You know, you have the tents and the fans and all dealers, right? And, you know, like my concern is that like basically paths that bring us along the journey and even paths that respects our interests are paths that inevitably take longer because they involve doing non-scalable work that involves like doing things within each and every yet individual human, physical environment, social environment, technical environments.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Right. And so I think for that reason, like 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 like it's it's worth the the costs of, you know, like not having AGI for another four years. Right. Now, you know, would I say that for 400 years? Again, hell no. Right? Now, the second question is like, well, do you know, do we actually have options for saying eight years instead of four years? Right. And, you know, like the thing that I've said is basically to me like the most sort of both feasible and non-dystopian option for this is like

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  basically, yeah, like reduction in available hardware. Right? And in the reason why it's like minimally, like the most known non-dystopian of all the options is because hardware is like already an incredibly centralized thing. Right. There's exactly four countries that produce that produce all the chips. And actually, yeah, actually Taiwan produces 70, over 70% of all the chips. And the usual argument against like trying something is basically like no matter what the US does, like China is just going to take over. Right. And like, if you look at what China is actually doing, right? It's like, one is that it's still in the low single digits in terms of chips. But two is in terms of

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  The strategy that China is actually executing on, it's like it's not a leader at making super high capability models. It's a fast follower on making high capability models together with being a leader in broad deployment. And so this is actually not something like there is not a basically a dynamic where like with an extra four years worth of delay, like basically China is just going to immediately do the four year trajectory instead. Like I think we exist.

• 1:15:09Speaker 04

  So are you saying that is that a prescription to delay? To try to take measures to try to delay?

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, 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.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  What do the four years buy you? Like, what are you going to figure out over the next four years?

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  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. You know, we have to reorg the economy.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Uh, and you want to get closer closer to the adiabatic limit. Like, I would understand that, but at the same time, I think because because we're in this geopolitical geopolitically tense moment in history. I think, you know, if we if you tell Nvidia to stop producing as many chips, Huawei is going to step in and just outproduce them. And then they're going to they're going to 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 that's its own huge can of worms.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  I don't think you need a world government. I mean, I think like the actual option that people have suggested is basically like replicating the like the nuclear like weapons inspection regime, right?

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  But nuclear weapons, they don't, like, people aren't incentivized to proliferate nuclear weapons because they don't have huge positive economic impact.

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  They're not a dual-use technology.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  You also can't just copy and paste them and send them to somebody.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  But also, like, you know, selfishly, if you if you stop the growth of GPUs, you know, 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, you know, in a couple of years, you know, it's good, you know, gonna look like a genus, but right now, looking like a boy crying wolf. But it is coming. So knowing that, right? Knowing that, like, this whole delaying GPU shipments and like, oh, it's it's a waste of it's a waste of tokens. I don't know. So.

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  Is it possible that a lot of the advances, specifically in controls, or like, what I mean is RLHF, persona controls, mechanistic interpretability, these are things that have helped us with alignment and with decreasing iris? Is it possible that these things have emerged as a result of capabilities progress? Like, are?

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they have. Yeah. And I think that's exactly why, actually, like, four years starting in 2028 are worth, like, 100 times more than four extra years that you could, like, insert into the 1960s.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  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 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, where they might as well be dead.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  The upside is exponential.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  The upside is exponential.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  So delaying an exponential, it's exponential opportunity costs when extrapolated out, right?

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  And I think I think it's OK for all of us to, like, even the most certain people are probably like, reasonable to be questioning their own priors. But but would would you, like, giving this some thought and unpacking it a little bit more, like, like, think about that trade-off?

• 1:18:41Speaker 00

  The, yeah, the trade of like, costs versus benefits of, yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, yeah, just to kind of articulate verbally what some of those benefits are. I mean, one is, again, having a better understanding of of alignment. Two is being able to, like, actually execute on.

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  Some of the technology paths that involve like helping, making sure humanity can adapt to all of this, that like inevitably involves like going into like individual countries, individual communities and individual buildings, minimizing the risk that like basically there is one single entity that establishes some kind of permanent lock-in on like 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, it's basically, you

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  know, this kind of gets into P Doom, right? I think, you know, for me, yeah, I mean, like, if it's a matter of four years versus eight years intuitively, I would say, you know, P Doom in the eight-year scenario is like what maybe between like a quarter and a third lower. And on the other hand, I mean, if we measure the benefit of things coming faster by like, say, lives saved by ending aging, then that's, you know, 60 million a year, which is like less than one percent of the population each year. So if you look like, if you look at the math this way, then like, I think there's definitely a margin on which like caution actually does become favorable.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  What do you think? Do you think the number is about four years, basically?

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  I mean, this is, I mean, again, I have, like, I have very high uncertainty, right? And I actually don't advocate like flipping the switch on reducing hardware access tomorrow. I like, I'd be like, 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, like, the public will start to get very worried and there will be a lot of demand of demand for this, right?

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  A couple of years ago, you know, 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.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Okay, and you gotta be comfortable with that. So you gotta, 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, you know, like corporations, and we call that capitalism. We align self-interests in, you know, exchange of monetary value. And to me, the thing I want us to get to that is maybe more, you know, relevant to some folks in the room is how crypto could be a coupling, right? Like, let's say, 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.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  How do you, how do you ensure, you know, you trust an exchange of monetary value when it's no longer backed by violence? So maybe cryptography offers a way to, to, you know, 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.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  So, well, anyway, do you have an answer to how crypto could help like align potentially AIs and humans?

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think like, you know, the key question is basically like, what is the mechanistic property of this future world that will even cause like people's wishes and needs to be respected at all, right? And like the two tools that we have are basically, yeah, I mean, there's like people's labor, there's legal systems, and there's property rights, right? And, you know, 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 right. A right of sorts over like cones of the earth. And then the question is like, people like, the risk is basically, you know, like the, like what happens in a world where the

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  economic value of people's labor goes to zero, right? And this is something that, you know, has not happened historically, right? And but like, if you, if you compare now to 200 years ago, right? Like, compare, 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.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  I, I think we're just naturally, we kind of ascend the control hierarchy over the world to positions of higher leverage. Right? There's not as much manual labor, there's less friction. We can, we can take action in the world with, 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 a system equilibrates, right? And so I, I understand trying to slow down so that we can, you know, reach that equilibrium more smoothly.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  In principle, but I think in practice, it's unenforceable.

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely like much, like I'm less sure that, you know, human labor can, continuing to be worth more than zero is like a default outcome. I think it's an outcome that is possible if like some of these, you know, human AI merge and human augmentation technologies develop, right?

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  You should fund that.

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, we should, um, you know.

• 1:25:26Speaker 04

  So that's actually a great segue point. Allow me, please allow me to ask is, uh, here's how I'll put it to both of you. And we're, we're running a little tight on time. Let's try to make this one tighter is. Ten years from now, if things went really poorly, what went wrong? What does the world look like and what went wrong? If ten years from now, things go great, what does the world look like and what went great? And then, and then apply the same thing briefly to a hundred years? And to a billion years?

• 1:26:01Speaker 00

  I think, actually, just to like-

• 1:26:03Speaker 04

  And keep it short.

• 1:26:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, just to, actually, just to answer the question about crypto first, I think-

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  Getting back to property rights, right? Like, I think it's, like, it's good to, like, work on both of those legs and, like, basic, I think it would be nice if the, the property rights system that, like, humans and, like, ideally all of us have, like, 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, like, it gives us that leverage to have some, like, to be, to have some guarantee that, you know, like, our interests, you know, like, will be respected and acted upon, right? So, yeah, I think, you know, having a

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  emerged financial system as opposed to, like, two totally separate things where, basically, the value of the human one, just like, on the whole, drops to, drops to zero, like, it's, yeah, like, the merged one is much better. And if crypto can be that, that's amazing, right? So, no, that'll be my answer.

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  That's the ten year?

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think that's part of the ten year. Okay, so, yeah, but the ten, yeah, I think the ten year, I mean, for me, it's, it's, you know, one, and one, one aspect of this is avoid World War III, right? I think, you know, this is important to talk about, because, like, World War III will make all of the pessimistic assumptions about international coordination being impossible very true. And I think, you know, avoiding World War III is important. And then the other thing is also just preparing the, the world and people and environments for higher capabilities that we're going to have, right? And this includes greatly improving cybersecurity.

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  This includes greatly improving biosecurity, greatly improving info security. Yes, you know, we need AI assistance that help us, understands the world and like fighting and protect us from, you know, memetic threats. So that's 10 years. I think the second stage there is basically like what happens in the kind of spooky era, right? And, you know, in the spooky era, basically, you know, you have AIs that are smarter than any of us today and can think a million times faster than us today. And like, what do we do in that world, right? And I think, you know, there are people who wants to say basically like, hey, we should just all have a happy retirement.

• 1:28:35Speaker 00

  And like, I can see why that vision is seductive. I think it's like, I find it unsatisfying for two reasons. I think one of those reasons is sort of instability, right? It's that basically, you know, we are like meatbags, beat up of matter that could do a million times more computation than what we're doing. And, you know, AIs will notice that. And at some point, like, the idea that the like meat can stay aligned and resist that pressure forever is, you know, it feels like a risk. And also kind of the deeper thing is that I think like part of being human is having

• 1:29:19Speaker 00

  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 like lives of maximum comfort, regardless of like what I do, like, I would feel empty, right? And I think a lot of people feel that way, right? And so like, I hope that we figure out like human AI augmentation and like what that looks like, you know, does like ultimately, yeah, you know, like, does that lead to the same path as uploading? Like, you know, this is a thing that we need to figure out. Like there is, you know, there is a A possible world where some people choose to remain more normal and I think

• 1:30:03Speaker 00

  everyone should have that right. It's possible even that like Earth should remain as the planet for people who take that option, right? And we basically figure out something that like 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 and 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.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  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 medics, our 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.

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

  So you're saying you're worried that instead of climbing the Kardashian scale, we'll climb the Kardashian scale?

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  Oh, nice. So we've been waiting for that all day.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. Like I think I think your point on like the hedonic singularity as being a risk, you know, people would just like, you know, even if you have neural links or AR VR, people could just like, you know, goon forever in some some room and and like just maximizing pleasure and that's like a local optimum for your brain and that's something we want to want to avoid. I think I think optimistically in 10 years, we have extremely powerful AI that's extremely helpful to us. We 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 not,

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  you know, it can it's see and hear is everything you see and hear and you could talk to it. And 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. Uh, yeah, I do think most companies are going to be extremely hybrid. Most mostly AI, some 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 like mentally walled off. We can't do those. Oh, yeah. Yeah. 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 100 year time scale, possibly, yes.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  I think I think in 10 years, there's going to be a huge bunch of biological breakthroughs. You know, peptides are kind of like an interesting new area, but there's, I mean, there's this, there's a whole floor here on on next gen biotech. You should go talk to them. I I think, you know, optimistically, we see the cost of making discoveries in biology going down. The opposite of E. Room's law, right? The E. Room's law is like Moore's law in reverse for biology. The cost of any discovery there going up exponentially. Uh, and so so to me, I think I think naturally, you know, 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 I think the next frontier is going to be AI helping us live longer, healthier lives.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  On a hundred and billion year time scale, it's going to steer our evolution, right? I am very bullish on the biological substrate, uh, despite what people think. I do think silicon has some advantages, but biology is amazing. We're like 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 can flexify over time. And and you you are a biological general intelligence.

• 1:33:48Speaker 00

  Do you think it's possible to get biological intelligence like us to think at 10,000 tokens a second?

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  Um, potentially, yeah. I mean, at the same time, like, you know.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  You 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 time scale separation of the... You know, there's a hierarchy of intelligence and we can be part of a system, just like mitochondria are part of a cell. We can... 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 billion years, our biology is going to have, you know, evolve quite a bit. We might be biosynthetic hybrids.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  We're definitely going to have terraformed Mars, several planets, maybe access to other stars. I think on 100-year time scale, 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 you want? That's amazing. That's amazingly good.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Like, 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.

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  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've been doing this for a while. It's been amazing. I think we're going to have to wrap it up. 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 us, obviously, but really for

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  each other, like walking away from this, kind of chewing on thinking about as we as we leave this place?

• 1:36:31Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, if I actually had one, I actually would have loved to just to give you one of the CAT as a gift. It's the 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 device, thing like this, and maybe even something that can, you know, like outcompete Fitbit watches and do amazing things for your health and do it all privately. And you will get it quite soon.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll keep chatting. I think I think I want to artificial life pill you, you know, artificial life on the network. I think it could be, it could definitely drive the cost of intelligence down. It could be an economy. You know, we've outsourced manufacturing to China, allowed us to go to higher levels, you know, different types of jobs that are more comfortable, higher leverage, maybe a lot of cognitive work where they could outsource to the swarm of AIs. Eventually, that's gonna, it's gonna live on a dice and swarm and so on. I think there's a unique opportunity right now. Crypto is gonna be the coupling between AI and humans. I truly believe that. How else are you gonna build trust between species, right? And I think we need to start thinking about that

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  like really thoughtfully. So maybe that's, we're gonna keep chatting about that.

• 1:37:51Speaker 03

  Awesome. Incredible. Thank you guys so much for

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

• 1:37:57Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked 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 X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:38:22Erik Torenberg?

  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.