Is Crypto an AI Accelerant?

This week on Product-Led AI, we discuss the intersection of AI and crypto. 

While AI makes it possible to impersonate on a vast scale, crypto forces verification and creates digital scarcity. 

Or, in the words of Balaji Srinivasan, “AI makes everything fake. Crypto makes it real again.”

The inherent dichotomy of AI and crypto – AI is probabilistic, whereas crypto is deterministic – make the technologies very complementary. If done correctly, both can accelerate the advancement and adoption of each other. 

“They are dual technologies,” says Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase who is an active angel investor and advisor.  “If AI acts as the front end, crypto can be the back end. AI can convincingly fake a lot of things that humans do, but crypto gives you proof of human.”

I agree with Balaji on the potential of both AI and crypto as enabling technologies to build a more secure, efficient, and accessible financial services system.  Not only does crypto create a more digitized and accessible data set for financial markets – it also creates an open and digitally native execution layer. As we’re moving towards a world of autonomous AI agents, we need open protocols in finance to get these agents to actually execute on real world tasks. The closed, monopolistic databases of traditional finance simply won’t work – not because it’s technically impossible for banks to create APIs that work for AI agents – but because there’s no incentive for banks to make these APIs open to developers. 

We also discussed the risks and merits of open source AI; how crypto can create a governance layer for AI; how zero knowledge can enable AI to train on more sensitive data sets; the potential for digital job creation and cross-border payments; and how crypto can help mitigate the growing problem of AI-generated spam. 

“A big issue that people talk about is how AI is killing the open web, but crypto’s going to bring you back,” says Srinivasan. “Why? Because blockchains are a gigantic public data structure.”

This interview was a great way to end the first season of Product-Led AI. While I started this series with a bigger-picture look at the many ways entrepreneurs and businesses are building AI-first products at the application layer, the next season will go deeper on on how AI is reshaping financial services. 

You can listen to or watch our interview at the links below. You can read a transcript from the interview and find more about the episode and the entire series at productledaipod.com.

Feedback welcome :)