 ▲ Vitalik Buterin says the “AGI competition frame is wrong”… proposing an Ethereum-based alternative / ChatGPT-generated image |
Vitalik Buterin directly criticized the view that frames artificial intelligence progress as an “AGI competition,” and proposed an alternative path for AI development centered on Ethereum.
According to cryptocurrency news outlet CCN on February 10 (local time), the Ethereum co-founder argued that treating AGI as a race over who reaches it first rewards status and speed over safety, making it a flawed framework. He emphasized that AGI should not be simplified into a single finish line, but rather viewed as a space of selectable designs that include power distribution and safety architecture.
Buterin’s critique followed a remark by Anatoly Yakovenko that “the world would be better off if Buterin focused on AGI development.” In response, Buterin countered that AI and cryptocurrency should not be seen as separate philosophies, but should be integrated in ways that protect human agency and reduce catastrophic risks.
The alternative he laid out is a short-term roadmap built around four pillars rather than a single end goal. The first is constructing AI usage environments premised on privacy and minimal trust. This includes the use of local models, untraceable payment structures for API calls, and trusted execution environments (TEEs) or proof-based client-side verification.
The second pillar envisions using Ethereum as an economic coordination layer for AI agents. Instead of running models on-chain, the focus is on providing economic rails for agent-to-agent payments, deposits, service hiring, and dispute resolution. In this context, he also referenced the ERC-8004 proposal, which would allow agents to discover and interact with each other without prior trust between organizations.
The third and fourth pillars involve extending the crypto principle of “don’t trust, verify” to AI, and the argument that AI can lower the cost of judgment to address limitations in prediction markets, decision markets, and governance mechanisms. He noted that recent developments—such as the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) withdrawing a draft rule on event contract regulation and ongoing state-level legal conflicts over prediction markets—make these discussions increasingly practical.
Buterin does not claim that Ethereum offers a solution to dominate AI. Rather, he stressed that in an environment where AI is increasingly agent-based, the core issue is not speed but constraints, and that deliberately designing for constraints such as privacy, verifiability, user control, and decentralized coordination is crucial.
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