Conversation

AI-blockchain convergence is probably much closer than it seems. Beneath the shallow tech-culture rivalry I’m seeing more and more weird complementarity. One strong signal is that there is a nontrivial contingent of mathematicians with serious chops in both.
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Another is that there is hardware level kinship. Not an accident that GPUs are useful for both kinds of compute.
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Makes sense because though there’s big $ in AI it’s all concentrated in big orgs or well-funded startups while crypto money is more distributed. That’s one reason I think the rivalry is shallow. At a technical/math level, it’s almost PB&J but the economic scenes do not harmonize.
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Replying to @vgr
I feel like the ML people talk about crypto (negatively) significantly more than the crypto people talk about ML (that is it say, almost never)
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Interesting point. In fact I’d make the stronger case that an AI safety problem is only real if it can be cast as a crypto rights/identity/data ownership type problem. Otherwise it is some bullshit theology about basilisks, simulations, paperclips and such.
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Replying to @vgr
The acceleration towards AI safety problems for which there are probable crypto solutions may force it.
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That’s somewhat what and Drexler did a few years ago, framing AI security as an extension of the distributed computer security work they started in the Agoric papers. Mark, wasn’t there a doc too?
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Crypto in the cryptography sense yes. The amount of safety problems that blockchain can solve for AI without mental gymnastics or transforming to a DB with encrypted storage and encryption in-use, are very few (if any).