Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin thinks one application of artificial intelligence he'd like to see is AI-assisted code and bug-finding standardization.
“Ethereum's biggest technical risk right now is probably bugs in the code,” he said on Twitter. “And anything that could dramatically change the game would be amazing.”
Not surprisingly, the responses on Twitter were full of startups claiming to have developed game-changing technology that Buterin was very excited about.
The Ethereum co-founder doesn't always seem optimistic about AI's impact on technology or humanity in general. In his November blog “My Techno-Brightness”, the founder of Ethereum speculated that AI could develop its own “mind” and work on humans and become the new super species.
“This is quite a claim: there are many islands of civilization that will remain untouched to pick up the pieces, as catastrophic as climate change, or man-made pandemics, or nuclear war could cause.” He wrote at the time. “But if a super-intelligent AI decides to turn on us, it could leave no trace and end humanity for good. Even Mars may not be safe.
There were no AI doomsday predictions in the thoughts he shared on Twitter Monday morning. The shift from doom and gloom to optimism continues with Buterin.
In a blog post in January, Buterin said AI could be “the game changer” in cryptocurrency markets. It's not unprecedented. He pointed out that bots have been better at trading than humans at arbitrage or using price differences in the market for years.
But before talking about AI-driven prediction markets, he wrote, “AI arbitrage bots are just the first example of a much larger category, which I expect will soon begin to include many other applications.”
Ethereum developers will join a growing segment of the tech industry if they start using AI for code validation and bug detection.
Earlier this month, Microsoft reported higher revenue in Q4 2023—thanks in large part to its multi-year partnership with OpenAI. As the company stated during the earnings report, AI is the main driver of its success, whether it is generative AI models, code analysis, image generation or visual recognition.
Quick note: Microsoft uses the fiscal year, not the calendar year, for revenue. So its 2024 Q2 ended on December 31, 2023.
“It was a record quarter driven by the continued strength of Microsoft Cloud, which topped $33 billion in revenue,” CEO Satya Nadella said at Microsoft's second quarter earnings conference call. “We've moved from talking about AI to implementing AI at scale.”
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