The crypto bros are coming for AI

• It’s been a bad year for crypto, with prices crashing and key figures like SBF going to jail.

• Experts say crypto influencers and startups have responded by pushing hard toward AI.

• They warn that a steady influx of crypto-refugees could help fuel a growing AI culture war.

At a crypto convention in 2021, Celsius co-founder and CTO Nuke Goldstein could barely contain his enthusiasm for the brave new world of the blockchain.

“When you work in crypto you are working on a rollercoaster, it’s fun but it’s crazy,” he said, in a video posted to Celsius YouTube channel. “But you wake up every morning and you know you’re changing the world.”

Two years later, it’s fair to say that Goldstein has lost some of his enthusiasm for crypto.

Celsius went bankrupt in 2022, with several customers losing thousands of dollars in the processand Goldstein now has a new job — because CEO of AI marketing startup Raver.AIwhich promises that msgstr “unleash the power of AI.”

Goldstein is one of many figures in the cryptocurrency world quickly pivoting towards AI. With crypto funding drying up and the likes of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao in prison or facing criminal chargesmany are now trying to reinvent themselves in an attempt to cash in on the burgeoning new technology.

In November, Paul Hsu, founder of crypto-focused VC firm Decasonic, said The Wall Street Journal that of the 200 crypto startups the company reviews every week, about 20 are turning to AI.

“I think it was the natural progression for a lot of people after last year’s crypto crash,” Jacob Silverman, a journalist and author who has covered the crypto industry extensively, told Business Insider. “A lot of it is just after the money.”

Adding fuel to the fire

AI is widely seen as a world-changing technology, with some warning that it could one day resulting in the extinction of humanity.

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Experts told Business Insider that the influx of refugees could fuel crypto the debate is already feverish between those pushing AI development to move even faster and those ensuring the technology is being built responsibly.

“Crypto people definitely have a sense of mission, and some of them really think that if you convert the world to Bitcoin you will somehow solve most of the world’s problems,” Silverman said.

“But that level of messianism and utopianism is really dialed up to 12 in AI. There is a real sense that they think they are doing something extremely important,” he said.

Guillaume Verdon is someone who fits that description. The former Google engineer founded his AI startup company Extropic in 2022 with money partly raised by business in NFTsagainst Forbes.

Forbes recently revealed that Verdon was one of the leading proponents of the obscure Silicon Valley AI ideology known as effective acceleration (often abbreviated to e/acc), writing on his X account under the pseudonym. “Beff Jesus.”

Verdon told Forbes that the “Jezos” persona doesn’t reflect his personality in real life, describing himself as a “sweet Canadian” who wants to “build a better future.”

In general, effective accelerators believe i technological progress unchecked as quickly as possibleregardless of the impact on society.

“The aim is to push us into a kind of capitalist utopia, where technology is given free reign over control and regulation,” said Benjamin Noys, a professor of critical theory at the University of Chichester who has done extensive research. has on acceleration.

AI culture war

When it comes to AI, effective acceleration means a lot of haste to create AGI or artificial general intelligence – a hypothetical model of AI that would be much smarter than humanity. This is in contrast to AI safety advocates who have warned that it could have dire consequences.

As a result, e/acc fans are often highly anti-censorship, something they share with the crypto enthusiasts now flooding the AI ​​industry.

“There is a strong overlap between the crypto people and the e/acc people,” Molly White, a former software engineer and crypto researcher, told BI.

“I think the ideology fits very well with parts of the crypto ideology, as well as the meme culture that was so big of crypto,” she said, referring to the often toxic online discourse which crypto proponents have regularly seen as a target of regulators. and suspect.

That overlap was readily apparent at a recent “unofficial” afterparty for OpenAI developer day attendees, which saw a pop star Grimes DJ for a crowd of enthusiastic speeders under banners decorated with “hurry or die” and the libertarian: “don’t tread on me” slogan popular among crypto enthusiasts.

The party was sponsored in part by Extropicaccording to Forbes, with Verdon attending and describing it as the start of “the sci-fi cyberpunk AI counterculture scene” in a Facebook post.

Fear of the future of AI

E/ACC has gained some high-profile backers over the past year, including veteran investors and early crypto backers Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan.

This online ideology has fueled debates about how AI technology companies should safely develop, with advocates such as Verdon. attack the OpenAI board as “decelarists” stand in the way of AI progress after temporarily removing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Noys warned that the ideology, with its emphasis on Terminator-style apocalypses and super-intelligent machines, could supersede the very practical concerns of AI with more unrealistic science fiction situations.

“It’s the big ideas of science fiction that make acceleration attractive. It has a kind of glamor and excitement that attracts these billionaires and tech intellectuals, it gives them a sense of status and philosophical power,” Noys said.

“I think the problem is that maybe the actual science and the actual kind of knowledge about things will be drowned out by the discourses that have the appeal of science fiction,” he said.

As Silicon Valley and the world grapple with these very real concerns, it seems unlikely that the influx of former crypto enthusiasts will do much to quell the brewing AI culture war.

Read the original article on Business Insider