Update March 16, 6:36 am UTC: This article has been updated to add comments from FLI president and CEO Anthony Aguirre.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Friday that he is no longer closely aligned with the Future of Life Institute, a group that received SHIB tokens from him in 2021.
Buterin said the institute initially pitched a broad roadmap to reduce existential risks, including threats tied to artificial intelligence, biotechnology and nuclear weapons, along with wider public education and research initiatives. He said that vision helped motivate his Shiba Inu (SHIB) donation.
Buterin said the institute later moved toward cultural and political advocacy around AI risks, an approach he described as materially different from the strategy outlined when he donated.
“My worry is that large-scale coordinated political action with big money pools is a thing that can easily lead to unintended outcomes, cause backlashes, and solve problems in a way that is both authoritarian and fragile, even if it was not originally intended that way,” he wrote.
Buterin expresses disagreements with FLI’s current approach
The FLI describes its mission as reducing extreme risks and steering transformative technologies to benefit humanity.
“We need policies to help ensure that AI development improves lives everywhere – rather than merely boosts corporate profits,” the organization states on its website.
However, Buterin said some of the group’s proposals focus on placing safeguards in biosynthesis devices and AI models so that they refuse to produce harmful outputs.
“I view this as a very fragile solution: there are many ways to jailbreak, fine-tune or otherwise get around such restrictions,” he added.
Anthony Aguirre, the president and CEO of FLI, said the organization has immense respect for Vitalik’s views on AI safety. He told Cointelegraph that they share a belief in a pro-human future.
“We support a great deal of work focused on coordination and epistemics, as well as on technical solutions around compute governance, secure chips and formal verification that systems work as intended,” Aguirre added.
While Buterin disagreed with some of their methods, Aguirre said it was “great to reaffirm that we are aligned in our support for these approaches.”
Related: Vitalik says ‘at present’ his donations yield better gains than investments
FLI cashed out $500 million from the SHIB donation
In 2021, Buterin received large amounts of SHIB tokens and other dog-themed tokens as developers attempted to use his name as a marketing tactic. He later allocated some of those tokens to charitable causes.
The FLI was one of the organizations that received tokens from Buterin. However, he said he did not expect the value of the donated tokens to reach roughly half a billion dollars.
“I thought that surely they would cash out at most $10-25M, because there’s no way the SHIB market is deep enough to cash out more,” he wrote. “Instead, they managed to cash out something like $500M.”
FLI announced in June 2021 that a $25 million multi-year grants program had been made possible by support from Buterin and the Shiba Inu community.
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