Vitalik Talks About Ethereum and AI Again: Opposes "Indiscriminate Acceleration" and Advocates Shaping AI's Future Through Decentralization and Privacy

On February 10th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted this morning, updating his systematic thoughts on the intersection of Ethereum and artificial intelligence. He emphasized that we should not pursue AGI through “indiscriminate acceleration,” but rather deeply integrate the values of crypto and AI to build an AI future that promotes human freedom, safety, and decentralized collaboration. Vitalik stated that understanding AI simply as a “race to see who develops it first and takes the lead” is fundamentally a misconception. He believes that whether it’s Ethereum or humanity’s development of AGI, the essence lies in choosing the right direction, not blindly accelerating technological progress. His core goals include avoiding the marginalization of humans by AI or the permanent deprivation of power by inescapable power structures, as well as preventing systemic risks caused by AI losing control or imbalance in offense and defense.

In terms of more short- to medium-term practical paths, Vitalik proposed four key directions:

1. Building more “trustless / privacy-friendly” AI interaction tools, including local LLM tools, support for anonymous ZK API payments, cryptographic solutions to enhance AI privacy, and client-side verification of server-side guarantees such as TEE proofs and cryptographic proofs. He pointed out that this essentially extends Ethereum’s privacy roadmap into LLM computing scenarios.

2. Using Ethereum as an AI economic interaction layer, covering AI API calls, employment relationships between bots, margin mechanisms, on-chain dispute resolution, and AI reputation systems like ERC-8004. The goal is to enable AI with economic interaction capabilities, supporting a more decentralized AI architecture rather than a closed system coordinated within a single organization.

3. Making the “cyberpunk-style self-verifying world” a reality. Leveraging LLMs to overcome the practical bottleneck where humans cannot verify code line-by-line, enabling trustless interactions such as: no third-party UI for Ethereum applications, generating and verifying transactions with local models, local auditing of smart contracts, understanding formal verification (FV) proofs, and verifying trust models of applications and protocols.

4. Reshaping market and governance mechanisms. Vitalik pointed out that mechanisms like prediction markets, decentralized governance, secondary voting, and combinatorial auctions are theoretically very attractive but are limited in the long term by human attention and decision-making capacity. LLMs can scale human judgment, making these mechanisms practically feasible again.

Vitalik summarized that these directions align with his proposed d/acc (defensive acceleration) philosophy and demonstrate the potential for AI, ZK, and Ethereum to develop synergistically. He believes that, by revisiting the decentralized ideals since 2014 and leveraging AI and cryptographic tools, these visions can be truly realized.