BlockBeats News, March 13th, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a post explaining his relationship with the Future of Life Institute and his stance on AI risk issues.
Vitalik stated that in 2021, he passively received a large amount of meme coins like SHIB, with the on-paper value peaking at over $1 billion. He then donated half to CryptoRelief and the other half to FLI, expecting FLI to cash out a maximum of $10-25 million. However, FLI actually cashed out around $500 million. (CryptoRelief had a similar situation)
Vitalik mentioned that FLI later underwent an internal strategic shift, focusing on large-scale political actions as the primary mechanism, which significantly differed from the initial plan. He expressed concerns about this, believing that driving political action with a large fund pool could lead to unintended consequences and potentially evolve into an authoritarian approach, such as by restricting open-source AI to support a single “correct” institution’s dominance. Such practices carry a significant risk of backfiring.
