Balaji Srinivasan: How AI Will Change Politics, War, and Money

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

So, Polytheistic AGI, I think, is one very useful macro frame. It means every culture has their own AGI. And eventually, every culture has their own social network and cryptocurrency and AI. You know, the AI is sort of like their oracle, this is the center of society, and they've got their deterministic law with cryptocurrency and their probabilistic guidance with AI, the social network that binds the whole thing together. So, those three technologies are like social technologies that are almost like the reactor core of the network state of a modern internet-first society.

Erik Torenberg (0:30)

The way we talk about AI often reveals more about us than the technology itself. In this episode, I'm joined by technologist and founder Balaji Srinivasan, alongside a16z General partner, Martin Casado, to unpack how our language, whether we frame AI as a god, a swarm, or a tool, shapes our hopes and fears. Balaji, known for his work in crypto and network states, also has deep roots in machine learning. Today, we explore where AI discourse has gone off course, what today's systems can and can't do, and how different cultures might build very different AIs, each reflecting their own values and constraints. It's a conversation about belief, control, and the systems we build. Let's get into it. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. Please note that a16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Martin and I were talking offline about how amazing your thread was on AI. And you know, often you're a crypto guy, you're a network state guy, but you're a technologist. And you've been thinking about AI for quite some time. So why don't you trace this through your evolution a bit?

Balaji Srinivasan (1:57)

Totally. So, you know, actually, Martin and I are roughly contemporaries at Stanford. I got my PhD in 05, 6 And I think about you-

Martin Casado (2:06)

And then 7 Yeah.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:08)

So we're roughly-

Martin Casado (2:09)

We overlapped almost completely, yeah.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:11)

Yes, that's right. I'm a little gray down over here and Martin's a little gray over here. And we're complimentary grays.

Martin Casado (2:17)

We both have that ambiguous kind of Middle Eastern look.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:20)

Yes, exactly. That's exactly-

Martin Casado (2:21)

Even though neither of us are Middle Eastern.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:23)

That's correct. That's exactly right. That's right. So we're both men of a certain age, I think is fair, as the phrase goes. And the funny thing is, you know, I taught machine learning and computational statistics, and so on the context of genomics at Stanford for, you know, the mid 2000s and founded a DNA sequencing company. And really, I would say, like, my original career expertise for 10 years, it's all I was doing was, in a sense, ML full time. But then I got into crypto right in the early mid 2010s, just as the deep learning revolution was getting underway with ImageNet and all that series of papers in the mid 2010s, early 2010s. So I've suggested my thought process, I have a foundation in probability and stats and multivariable calculus and blah, blah, blah. And so I'm conversing with the space. The thing I will say, and I'm sure Martin has thought on this and I'll get to this specific tweet. In the 2010s, we were all tracking diffusion models and language models and so on. Some of it was improving, but like style transfer, for example, the mid 2010s was working by that time, right? And GPT-2 and so on was interesting. It could kind of blurt out like a sentence. But I admit that I never really thought it was going to get past like Markov chain-y like stuff, you know? I was surprised at how much better GPT, like Dali was a hint in early 2022 But I was surprised at how coherent ChatGPT was. I think everybody was, but it was like a huge jump up from what it was before in terms of sort of being Markov chain. And so I've been kind of observing our last, you know, two years being originally very deep in machine learning, then very deep in crypto. But you know, you can't be deep in everything. You can't be deep in, or maybe Elon can't. Okay, aside from Elon, it's pretty hard to be at the cutting edge of so many different fields at the same time because there are deep fields which have a lot going on. So with respect to AI, there's like several realizations I've had over the last few years in terms of the unarticulated limitations of the space, right? Some of these I think I sort of, I think I came with relatively early in the history of modern AI and others I think I've come to more recently. But let me kind of enumerate them in no particular order. Martin, jump in anytime. So the first is that something that motivated, I think, both Eli Iser and Altman, a bunch of folks who built OpenAI, was almost like the same kind of sentiment that motivated people to build like the Sistine Chapel, which was sort of like an implicit Abrahamic monotheism, which was like summoning God, right? Like, you know, communing with God. But in the Abrahamic God sense, right? That of also the vengeful God who had turned you into paper clips, like turning you into pillars of salt, right? That was an implicit thing that was behind, right? Because when they talk about AGI, they talk about AGI as implicitly a unitary thing. We will get to AGI and then it will go to infinity and will be like, you know, raptured, singularity kind of thing, even though that's implicit. And because I've been thinking so much about crypto and other kinds of things, I was like, well, there's a different sort of implicit school of thought, which is polytheistic AGI, right? Do we have, rather than the vengeful god, do we have war of the gods? Do we have many superhuman intelligences, all from different cultural backgrounds that have the mores and the values imprinted on them? And very early on, I had a tweet that said, at a minimum, there's going to be American AI and Chinese AI. And if we're lucky, there'll be decentralized, open source, you know, crypto style AI. Because at the time, the American AI was woke, highly woke, this is 2022 And I knew that China was going to stop at nothing to copy it. So I knew we were going to get at least two. And I thought we might get N if we were lucky enough to get decentralized AI. And that wasn't obvious at that time because the cost training models was so high and open AI was so far ahead. It took a while before other people caught up. But now it's very clear that we're going to have lots and lots of high quality, open source, decentralized models, like a new one comes out almost every week, you know, and China is going to work hard on this. That's a big thing, like all the deep seek models, etc. So Polytheistic AI, I think, is one very useful macro frame, which takes away some of the sort of AI apocalypse tones, I think, because I don't think the image generators or text chatbots are going to cause the destruction that people had. People thought they were going to like bust out and do systems programming, and Martin can speak about that. Martin and I kind of were talking about that. There are certain limitations. It sounds more clear, actually, that they're worse at systems programming than they are at visuals. We'll come back to that. So A, Polytheistic AI, and so what does that mean? That means every culture has their own AGI. And eventually, every culture has their own social network and cryptocurrency and AI, which is, the AI is sort of like their oracle that's at the center of society, and they've got their deterministic law with cryptocurrency and their probabilistic guidance with AI, the social network that binds the whole thing together. So those three technologies are like social technologies that are almost like the reactor core of the network state of a modern internet-first society, right? And they'll be customized for each different kind of group, and certain things will be disallowed and allowed, like image generation might not be allowed in subcultures or NSFW, whatever, all that kind of stuff would be tweaked. So okay, that's one concept. The second concept, you know, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who, by the way, you know, even if I disagree with a lot of his stuff, did do a lot to promote AI and people getting into it and so on and so forth. So even if I disagree with bombing the data centers and various other kinds of things, I give him significant partial credit for getting people motivated to look into the space. He was definitely into it in that sense. So like directionally, there was something, you know, I always try to see the right side of things. But a second big concept that I think I really disagree with Eliezer on, that I think is being borne out, is the idea that AI could just cogitate for millions of years and figure things out and it could outmaneuver you all the time. And we know that's not true because turbulence, chaos, cryptographic equations are not like that, right? You can come up with turbulent systems, chaotic systems, where you simply with finite precision arithmetic cannot forecast out indefinitely. In fact, you get fracturing and breaking. And cryptographic hashes are set up in such a way as well to be hypersensitive to initial conditions where a small change of one character can get a totally different MD5 sum or something like that. So those are situations. And if you wanted to, you come up with a thought experiment where you inserted turbulence or chaos into your decision process, sort of like you shake a turbulent clock or something like that before throwing a pitch. And they wouldn't be able to predict your actions, right? And that's like just a simple experiment in real life. Just, you know, the flow of a fluid is turbulent, you know.