Vitalik Buterin questions AI funded group strategy
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said on Friday that he is not in close contact with the Future of Life Institute, a group that received the SHIB token from him in 2021.
Buterin said the institute has a broad roadmap to reduce existing threats, including threats related to artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nuclear weapons, along with broad public education and research initiatives. He said the vision of the Shiba Inu (SHIB) helped inspire the donation.
Buterin said the institute has since moved into cultural and political advocacy around AI concerns, an approach that differs from the strategy he outlined when he donated.
“My concern is that large-scale, coordinated political action with large pools of money can easily lead to undesirable outcomes, lead to condemnation, and solve problems in an arbitrary and weak way, even if that's not the case to begin with,” he wrote.
Buterin expresses disagreements with the current FLI approach
FLI's mission is to reduce extreme risks and lead transformative technologies to benefit humanity.
“We need policies that help ensure that the development of AI improves lives everywhere — rather than boosting corporate profits,” the organization said on its website.
Buterin, some of the group's ideas focus on putting safeguards in biosynthesis tools and AI models to prevent them from producing harmful effects.
He added: “I see this as a very weak solution: there are many ways to jailbreak, fix or otherwise solve such limitations.”
Cointelegraph reached out to FLI for comments, but did not receive a response by print.
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FLI has spent $500 million from SHIB's donation.
In the year In 2021, Buterin received a large amount of SHIB tokens and other dog-themed tokens as developers tried to use his name as a marketing tactic. He later assigned some of the signs to charitable causes.
FLI was one of the organizations that received the Buterin token. However, he said he did not expect the value of the donated tokens to reach half a billion dollars.
“I thought for sure they would spend $10-25m at the most, because there is no way the SHIB market is going to spend more money,” he wrote. Instead, they managed to withdraw about 500 million dollars.
FLI announced in June 2021 a $25 million, multi-year grant program funded by the Buterin and Shiba Inu communities.
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