Vitalik Buterin eyes AI to help tackle Ethereum’s 'biggest technical risk'
Quick Take
- The Ethereum co-founder said that he’s excited about the assistance of artificial intelligence in code verification.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said artificial intelligence could help Ethereum developers identify bugs and assist with verification of code.
“One application of AI that I am excited about is AI-assisted formal verification of code and bug finding,” Buterin wrote in an X post on Monday. “Right now, Ethereum's biggest technical risk probably is bugs in code, and anything that could significantly change the game on that would be amazing.”
Buterin’s latest comment on AI comes after he wrote a blog post last month that broke down four ways that cryptocurrency and AI may overlap. “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,” he said.
One particular challenge in cryptography — as Buterin noted in the post — is that open-source is the only way to make something truly secure. But, in AI, a model being open greatly increases its vulnerability to adversarial machine learning attacks.
AI and web3
Analysts have said that the combination of innovations from AI and web3 could result in the emergence of a flourishing cryptocurrency subsector in 2024. Nansen analyst Sandra Leow emphasized the development of AI agents, a field that combines elements of AI and web3.
“We could foresee a world where AI agents become a primary category of users on the blockchain, and some examples include verification management applications that use zero-knowledge learning technologies like Modulus Labs,” Leow told The Block in December.
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