Vitalik Buterin says AI can help solve Ethereum’s ‘biggest technical risk’.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin says artificial intelligence (AI) could be crucial to solving one of Ethereum's “biggest technical” concerns: bugs buried in its code.

Buterin shared his excitement for AI-powered auditing in a February 18 post on X, calling it the “biggest technical risk” to the network in the Ethereum network to identify and fix buggy code.

One AI application that I'm really excited about is AI-assisted routine code and bug detection.

Ethereum's biggest technical risk right now is bugs in the code, and anything that changes the game significantly on top of that would be amazing.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 19, 2024

Buterin's comments come as Ethereum closes in on the long-awaited Denko update, which is set to begin on March 13. testnet for four hours. Improvements to the Ethereum network are critical to blockchain's long-term roadmap.

However, not everyone agrees that AI is a reliable tool for detecting errors in Ethereum-based code.

In the year In July 2023, OpenZeppelin ran a series of tests that used OpenAI's GPT-4 to identify security issues in Solidity smart contracts – the native language of Ethereum code.

During these tests, GPT-4 successfully identified vulnerabilities in 20 out of 28 challenges.

When GPT-4 fails to detect errors, it can often be triggered to fix the errors quickly. But, at other times, the Opzeppelin AI invented a vulnerability that really wasn't there in the first place.

Similarly, Kang Lee, head of security at CertK, told Cointelegraph that using AI-powered tools — like ChatGPT — in code often creates more security issues than it solves.

In general, he recommends using AI assistants only as an aid to experienced coders, as they help quickly explain to developers what a line of code means.

“I think ChatGPT is a very useful tool for people doing code analysis and reverse engineering. It's definitely a great helper, and it greatly improves our productivity.”

Related: Making Vitalik Buterin's cypherpunk dream come true for Ethereum

While Buterin is mostly optimistic about the future of AI, he has previously warned developers to be careful when implementing AI with blockchain technology, especially when deployed with “high-risk” applications such as Oracle.

It's important to be careful: if someone builds a stablecoin that uses, for example, a prediction market or an AI oracle, and the oracle gets hacked, that's a huge amount of money that can be lost in an instant.

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