Tech
Vitalik Buterin Says Developers Should ‘Proceed With Caution’ When Mixing Cryptocurrency and AI
Artificial intelligence has stolen some of the luster from cryptocurrencies in the last year: a Web3- and Metaverse-obsessed Silicon Valley seems to have turned its attention entirely towards large language models and apps like ChatGPT.
Some blockchain projects have tried to capitalize on the new AI hype, but while cryptocurrencies startups like WorldcoinOpenAI founder Sam Altman’s identity company has identified use cases that span both worlds, but many AI-powered crypto projects tend to feel more like buzz than substance.
Whatever the potential pitfalls, according to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the intersection of cryptocurrency and AI is still promising. In a blog post published on tuesdayButerin shared his thoughts on where cryptography and AI technologies might collide in the coming years, while also cautioning that there may be challenges.
Using the analogy of a “game,” Buterin divided the potential overlaps between AI and blockchain into four distinct categories.
The most “viable” category, according to Buterin, contains applications where the AI acts as “a player in a game.” At a high level, this category includes apps where “the ultimate source of incentives comes from a protocol with human input.” An example of this would be a prediction market: AI can be used to predict the outcome of a given event, and a blockchain-based mechanism can enforce rules about how much the AI (or the person running it) should be rewarded or penalized based on its guess.
The next category, which Buterin labels “high potential but high risk,” includes applications where AI acts as an “interface to the game.” In these applications, AI is used to help users “understand the crypto world around them” and ensure their behavior “matches their intentions.” Buterin gives the example of scam detection capabilities, such as the one used in the MetaMask crypto wallet to warn users if they might be interacting with a deceptive application. Such capabilities could be “enhanced” by AI’s improved detection and explanation capabilities.
The third category Buterin defines describes apps where AI dictates the “rules of the game.” “Think ‘AI judges,’” he explained, warning that one should “treat with great caution” when exploring this problem space. An obvious crypto use case here would be to help DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, make subjective decisions using AI.
Buterin’s fourth category for the potential marriage of AI and cryptocurrency includes use cases where AI is “the goal of the game.” This “long-term” category involves using blockchain as the infrastructure to build better AI models.
While Buterin says he’s more optimistic than he once was about the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency, he sees potential challenges in balancing the transparency of cryptography with the usual opacity of “black box” AI systems: “In cryptography, open source is the only way to make something truly secure, but in AI, a model (or even its training data) being open greatly increases its vulnerability to adversarial machine learning attacks.”
At the end of his post, Buterin issues a warning to developers: “It pays to proceed with caution.”