According to records shared by Kaito AI research partner Sandra. At an artificial intelligence conference in Singapore, Balaji Srinivasan, former Coinbase chief technology officer and former general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, delivered a thought-provoking speech, explaining the relationship between cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI) and the its future potential. He provides a simple and concise framework that reveals how these two multi-trillion dollar technologies complement each other and together shape the future.
Cryptocurrency and AI are opposites on many levels. For example, the rise of AI is top-down, originating from famous research laboratories and eventually promoted by institutions such as OpenAI. Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, rose from the bottom up and initially had little reputation. Still, both are equally important large-scale technologies, but emerged in very different ways.
In addition, modern AI is mainly based on statistics and is probabilistic, while cryptocurrency is procedural and deterministic. Diffusion models and large language models (LLMs) essentially start from probabilistic models, while cryptocurrencies demonstrate their certainty through methods such as verifying digital signatures.
However, this does not mean that the two technologies are at odds with each other. Instead, Balaji Srinivasan believes that the two technologies can actually perfectly complement each other. For example, AI represents digital abundance, making things easy to counterfeit, while cryptocurrency represents digital scarcity, making counterfeiting difficult. AI generates content, and cryptocurrencies authenticate content.
By linking digital content—whether articles, images, certificates, or other information—to blockchain transactions, a clear and trustworthy record of the content’s origin, authenticity, and any subsequent interactions can be established. In essence, while artificial intelligence can “evangelize” by spreading messages widely, cryptocurrencies can verify these messages to ensure that they are trustworthy and authentic.
In addition, AI model training is a very centralized task because it requires huge computing resources. Cryptocurrencies have demonstrated the ability to mobilize large amounts of capital through crowdfunding (pooling resources in a decentralized model). Many of the largest crowdfunding campaigns on the market are cryptocurrency projects. Although the current application is still very inefficient, in Some breakthroughs are expected in this area.
Finally, Balaji Srinivasan said:
“AI creates new authorities, and cryptocurrencies decentralize those authorities. Rather than envisioning a single omniscient and omnipotent artificial intelligence (AGI), what we can see is a world where multiple AGI entities coexist and compete, known as “ Polytheistic AGI."
