Who Controls AI Acceleration? Vitalik Buterin and Guillaume Verdon Debate

**Vitalik Buterin** (0:00)
Rapid technological acceleration has been a fact of a human civilization for about a century, and that acceleration is itself accelerating.

**Guillaume Verdon** (0:09)
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.

**Vitalik Buterin** (0:22)
If you take any one bit, and you kind of accelerate indiscriminately, then basically you do lose all value. 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.

**Guillaume Verdon** (0:38)
EAC isn't trying to kill everyone, it's actually trying to save everyone. If we decelerate, we're going to have a huge opportunity cost, and we're going to miss out on a much better future.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:47)
Two competing philosophies have emerged around how fast AI should advance. EAC, or Effective Accelerationism, says progress is inevitable and restraint only seeds ground. DEAC, or Defensive Acceleration, says speed without safeguards risks concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands. On this episode, originally aired on the A16z Crypto podcast, A16z Crypto CTO, Eddy Lazzarin, speaks with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and Guillaume Verdon, founder and CEO of Extropic, alongside Shaw Walters, founder of Eliza Labs.

**Shaw Walters** (1:28)
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 the first time that you guys have really talked in person, right? Awesome. And this is an incredible synthesis. So yeah, my name is Shaw. I've known these guys for a while. I'm here with Eddy from A16Z 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 just going to kind of throw some questions at them as we go along to keep it going. But feel free to dig into whatever you guys want to. This is really here for you. We're all just here to listen. And this will all be live streamed to the other floor. It's not going to be public. We will be cutting up the video and putting it out later. So everyone will get to see and share and everything. And I think without further ado, I'm going to leave it to Eddy to get started with some of the questions.

**Eddy Lazzarin** (2:36)
So before we ask them, I'd love to get a sense of the crowd. It's always hard to tell the difference between the Twitter timeline and reality. Who here could explain EAC 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. That might have been more, actually. That was very interesting. Okay. Thank you for that. So maybe we'll just start there. Right? Is the term accelerationism, at least in the techno-capitalist sense, dates back to Nick Land's CCRU research group in the 90s. But some might say that these ideas really took shape even further back, the 60s and 70s with Duluz and Qatari. Let me maybe start with Vitalik. Why are we having an earnest conversation about the ideas of philosophers right now? What makes this acceleration-ism idea relevant?

**Vitalik Buterin** (3:42)
Again, I think, ultimately I think we're all here trying to make sense of the world and trying to make sense of 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 giving a bit of head, but like rapid destructive change, right? So, you know, like the early era of this is that there was a, in the pre-World War I era around the 1900s, there was a lot of like original techno-optimist sentiments, right? And there was a lot of excitement back then. Well, you know, the thing that we call today tech back then, chemistry was tech and then electricity was also tech. And, you know, if you even, you know, like watch like even movies like some of the Sherlock Holmes ones, you get to like really feel the vibe of that kind of era, right? And it was rapidly improving living standards, rapidly liberating women in the household, doing amazing things, extending lives. And then, of course, you know, World War I happened, right? And in World War I famously, you know, people rode in with horses and rode out on tanks, right? And it was a destructive war. Then World War II came, and World War II was an even more destructive war. And, you know, it gave birth to I Am Become Death Destroyer of Worlds. And this is like some of the background of, you know, things like postmodernism and people basically trying to make sense of, like, okay, like, a lot of beliefs were shattered. And what do we believe now, right? And this is something that I think people believe, like, every generation, right? And there's a lot of people today who even grew up, you know, like, believing in, kind of, 1960s era postmodern beliefs. I mean, even, and feeling like those beliefs have been shattered, right? And even people who, for example, grew up believing in, you know, what, like, I would call hipster environmentalism. And it's this, like, lovely, beautiful idea. And, you know, we need to protect the environment and not go so fast. And then you believe in this. And then you realize that, like, wait, the nuclear power plants that you advocated to shut down basically means that, you know, your country is, like, stuck bootlicking Russia, right? And, like, okay. Basically, yeah, all, and, like, these are just, like, very natural things that happen, right? And I think, like, rapid technological acceleration has been a fact of a human civilization for about a century. And that acceleration is itself accelerating. And, you know, things like post-Botidism are a response to that. A lot of the currents of the 1960s were a response to that. And, you know, you can respond by saying it's inevitable. You can respond by saying we have to slow it down, as a lot of people did.