Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Saturday that social media platform owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are uniquely positioned to broker practical AI agreements between competing development camps. Buterin framed the proposal as a way for platforms like X and Meta to facilitate win-win deals between rapid AI research proponents and those advocating caution. His comments follow the AI Futures Project's release of the AI 2040 proposal, which calls for a US-China pact to deliberately delay superintelligence until 2040.
Buterin Proposes Social Media Leaders as AI Agreement Brokers
Buterin said in a post on X that platform owners such as SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg are in a unique position to broker win-win deals between proponents of rapid AI research and those asking for more prudence. "It's possibly one of the best things that social media could do for humanity if it wanted to," he added.
The Ethereum co-founder framed the larger discussion between AI 2040 proponents and opponents as a conflict of "totally incompatible worldviews" about how quickly and how far AI would go. Buterin noted that his own perspective rests on assumptions he can't definitively prove.
Ethereum Trades 63% Below August All-Time High
Ethereum trades more than 63% below its all-time high reached in August of last year. In terms of daily gains, Ethereum's price was up over 0.4% during the past 24 hours. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around ETH remained in the bullish zone, while chatter around it stayed in the normal levels over the past day.
Buterin Reiterates Support for d/acc Framework Investments
The Ethereum co-founder said he remained open-minded to AI slowdowns or pauses given his uncertainty about which scenario was correct. He pushed back on arguments he said concentrate power in the hands of a small number of major AI labs or governments.
Buterin returned to his original stance of connecting to Ethereum's d/acc architecture, investing in cryptography, formal verification, secure hardware and biosecurity. He argued that these investments are worthwhile regardless of what AI scenario unfolds. Buterin said his own proposal to retool the platform "is also naive" but that he currently sees "zero plans" for managing an AI transition that are not naive in some way.
AI 2040 Proposal Calls for US-China Superintelligence Delay
The comments come days after AI 2040: Plan A, a report published by former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo's AI Futures Project. The proposal calls for the U.S. and China to cooperate to delay the arrival of superintelligence to 2040 deliberately. The plan calls for full research transparency between the two countries and a verification framework it terms "mutually assured compute destruction," modeled loosely on nuclear deterrence logic.
Researcher Richard Ngo Criticizes AI 2040 Timeline Assumptions
The report has drawn criticism from AI researchers, including Richard Ngo, who argued that it overestimates how imminent superintelligence really is and underestimates the domestic political disruption AI will cause well before any US-China race plays out.
FAQ
What did Vitalik Buterin propose on Saturday regarding AI governance?
Vitalik Buterin said Saturday that social media platform owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are uniquely positioned to broker win-win AI agreements between rapid research proponents and those advocating caution. He described this as "possibly one of the best things that social media could do for humanity."
What does the AI 2040 proposal call for?
The AI 2040: Plan A proposal, published by former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo's AI Futures Project, calls for the U.S. and China to cooperate to deliberately delay the arrival of superintelligence to 2040. The plan includes full research transparency between the two countries and a verification framework termed "mutually assured compute destruction."
