Vitalik’s latest statement: slowing down AI, even pausing it, while staying open-minded.
He breaks today’s debate into two worldviews—one side is the “AI 2040” camp, which believes that without forceful intervention, superintelligence will inevitably arrive before 2040; the other side is the critics, who think the former underestimates humanity’s ability to coordinate and also threatens freedom. Vitalik positions himself in the middle: if he’s sure AI is only a normal technology, he’ll be closer to the critics; if he’s sure that ASI will default to arrival in 2030, he’ll lean toward AI 2040.
Because the uncertainty is so large, he remains open to mechanisms like “pre-set trigger conditions, and pause once extreme scenarios appear.” At the same time, he has clearly expressed discomfort with the stance promoted by certain major AI companies and intellectuals that “open source is harmful, and it’s best that we hold global dominance.”
He continues to support the d/acc path: formal verification, cryptography, securely open hardware, defensive biotech, food and basic resource security, and public cognition frameworks—these directions are worth advancing under any worldview. The 2040 plan itself has also leaned more toward open source and includes the idea of “mutually assured computation destruction.” Compared with a few players unilaterally depriving others of rights, this is an obvious improvement.
There’s no free lunch in “slow down vs. don’t slow down.” Vitalik admits he hasn’t seen any non-naive ASI transition方案, so he’s willing to show some leniency to those who seriously try.
For Web3, this statement deserves attention: decentralization, open source, and verifiability—these are exactly the foundational values that the crypto industry has long bet on, and they may also become key infrastructure for power checks and balances in the AI era.
#Vitalik #AI #dacc