The Web3 + AI Daily #47
Vitalik Buterin calls for trustlesness, the Silicon Valley vs. the Pope, and Web3 + AI for funding public goods.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to all newly-joined subscribers!
This is The Web3 + AI Daily, your definitive guide to the world of Decentralized AI (DeAI/dAI)! Today’s edition is rather thin due to Cloudflare being currently down and switching about 20% of websites worldwide off. However, if that’s not a glaring example of why we need blockchains and decentralization, I don’t know what is.
Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.
Web3 + AI Readings & Conversations
Vitalik Buterin Calls for Return to Trustlessness
Fortunately, there are voices that continue to reinforce crypto’s core principles and values. Vitalik Buterin, together with Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, published the “Trustless Manifesto” calling for a return to Ethereum’s core values: systems should be built on math and consensus, not trust in people or platforms.
The manifesto warns that Ethereum’s growing infrastructure is becoming fragile: there’s increasing reliance on centralized intermediaries (like RPC endpoints or sequencers), which undercuts trustlessness. The authors stress that while designs may evolve, the principles must remain unchanged: decentralization, neutrality, verifiability.
The Pope vs. The Tech Bros
If you’ve been worrying over tech magnates’ growing entitlement to play gods and ignore basic rules of decency, you’re not alone. A recent X tiff demonstrated once again how far they’ve gone.
a16z crypto‘s Marc Andreessen dared to mock the Pope after Pope Leo called for moral responsibility in AI development. Soon after, he deleted his post after facing backlash.
The attack — brief, sarcastic, and swiftly scrubbed — did more than reveal Silicon Valley’s disdain for moral guardrails. It exposed what I believe is the original sin of the entire tech industry: the refusal to recognize any authority greater than itself.
You probably know that I’ve always been critical of AI doomerism (the imagined scenario of AI wiping out humanity), as I consider it a business tactic by Big Tech to keep AI closed and proprietary. Accordingly, I’m not a big believer of super strict regulation since it tends to stifle innovation. Rather, I think that open-sourcing and decentralization of AI development would be the key to managing risks and introducing the necessary guard rails.
Nevertheless, when the Pope calls for following fundamental ethics standards when building AI, I’m inclined to agree. All the Pope is doing is insisting that power and progress must serve justice, human dignity, and the common good, and that should be valid for all technologies, always. And given how quickly the US democracy has been eroded by these same tech billionaires, I don’t mind having at least one world leader urging them to comply, be it a religious leader.
He’s perhaps the only figure these tech titans cannot buy off, bully, or co-opt.
Web3 + AI for Funding Public Goods
Kevin O. welcomed Ethereum Foundation‘s Devansh Mehta on the Green Pill podcast to talk AI-powered public goods capital allocation. More specifically, they discuss Deep Funding, an AI-powered funding mechanism that combines human evaluation and prediction markets to allocate resources for open-source projects.
Deep Funding scales human judgment, prevents Sybil attacks, and creates a fair, dynamic “price feed” for public goods. Devansh shares insights from the pilot run, the results of the data-science competition, and how the model will power Gitcoin‘s Grants 24.
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