In a recent blog post, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, discussed the intersection of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI), proposing four distinct areas where these technologies could intertwine.
He identified AI’s roles as an autonomous agent, a user interface, a set of rules, and a goal within the framework of cryptocurrency protocols. Buterin highlighted the feasibility of AI acting within protocols and the promising yet risky potential of AI as an interface.
He expressed that the greatest challenge lies in developing decentralized, universally trusted AI systems for broad application use. Eager to see the practical application of AI across these dimensions, Buterin is optimistic about discovering scalable solutions through innovative use cases.
“In general, use cases where the underlying mechanism continues to be designed roughly as before, but the individual players become AIs, allowing the mechanism to effectively operate at a much more micro scale, are the most immediately promising and the easiest to get right.
These applications have promise, both for functionality and for improving AI safety in a way that avoids the centralization risks associated with more mainstream approaches to that problem. But there are also many ways in which the underlying assumptions could fail; hence, it is worth treading carefully, especially when deploying these applications in high-value and high-risk contexts.”
— Vitalik Buterin
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