Who Controls AI Acceleration? Vitalik Buterin and Guillaume Verdon Debate
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Rapid technological acceleration has been a fact of a human civilization for about a century, and that acceleration is, it's self accelerating.
To me, that is the fundamental truth. Right? And whether we yell at it or disagree with it, it is happening. You know, it's like gravity. Those that adopt that culture will literally have higher likelihood of surviving in
the future. If you take any one bit and you kind of accelerate indiscriminately, basically you do all that. And so to me, the question is like, how do we accelerate intentionally? I think there is a real sense in which we have one shot at this.
EAC isn't trying to kill everyone. It's actually trying to save everyone. If we decelerate, we're gonna have huge opportunity costs and we're gonna miss out on a much better future.
Two competing philosophies have emerged around how fast AI should advance. EAC, or effective accelerationism, says progress is inevitable and restraint only seeds ground. Or defensive acceleration, says speed without safeguards risks concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands. On this episode, originally aired on the a 16 z crypto podcast, a 16 z crypto CTO, Eddie Lazarin, speaks with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and Guillaume Verden, founder and CEO of XTropic, alongside Shaw Walters, founder of Eliza Labs.
Nice. Wow. So this all started because I just knew these guys had to meet each other, and, it rapidly devolved into all of this, which I'm really glad to see. This is incredible. And it's it's the first time that you guys have really talked in person. Right? Awesome. And I I this is an incredible synthesis. So, yeah, my name is Shaw. I've known these guys for a while. I'm here with Eddie from a sixteen z crypto, and this is a great time. So everybody's here. I guess you're allowed to you know, please be respectful. This is a conversation between them. We're we're just gonna kinda throw some qu
So so before we ask them, I I'd love to get a sense of the the the crowd. You it's always hard to tell the difference between the Twitter timeline and reality. You know, who here could explain Eak in a few sentences to someone else? Wow. That's actually less than I thought. That's good to know. That's good to know. Who here could explain DEAC in a few sentences to someone else? Okay. May that might have been more, actually. Okay. That was very interesting. Okay. Thank you for that. So maybe we'll maybe we'll just start there. Right? Is the term accelerationism, at least in the techno capitalis
think ultimately, yeah, I I'll ultimately, I think, you know, we're all here trying to make sense of the world and trying to make sense of, you know, like, what it even makes sense to do in the world. Right? And this is something that we've had for thousands of years. I think the new thing that we've had for probably roughly a hundred years is making sense of a world that has rapid change, and sometimes even that has I mean, maybe this is us skipping a bit ahead, but, like, rapid destructive change. Right? So, know, like, the early the the early era of this is that there was a in the pre World
Alright. So so, Gil, so what is EAC and and why? What?
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