{"id":487132,"date":"2025-06-29T22:00:41","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T21:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cryptoslate.com\/?p=487132"},"modified":"2025-07-06T18:25:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T17:25:05","slug":"utopia-or-dystopia-the-race-to-build-god-like-ai-is-humanitys-ultimate-gamble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cryptoslate.com\/utopia-or-dystopia-the-race-to-build-god-like-ai-is-humanitys-ultimate-gamble\/","title":{"rendered":"Utopia or dystopia? The race to build God-like AI is humanity\u2019s ultimate gamble"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to\u00a0Slate Sundays<\/a>, CryptoSlate\u2019s new weekly feature showcasing in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto.<\/em><\/p>\n

I had to hold two separate interviews with Sentient to sit with the information, digest it, and follow up. AI is not my area of expertise, and it\u2019s a topic I\u2019m wary of, given that I struggle to see favorable outcomes (and being labeled an \u201cAI doomer\u201d in this industry is enough to get you canceled).<\/p>\n

But ever since I listened to<\/a> AI alignment and safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky on Bankless in 2023, his words echo round my brain on an almost nightly basis:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that we are hearing the last winds start to blow and the fabric of reality start to fray.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve tried to keep an open mind and learn to embrace AI before I get steamrolled by it. I\u2019ve played around tweaking my prompts and making a few memes, but my restless disquiet persists.<\/p>\n

What troubles me further is that the people building AI systems fail to provide sufficient reassurance, and the general public has become so desensitized that they either giggle at the prospect of our extinction or can only hold the thought in their heads for as long as a YouTube short.<\/p>\n

How did we get here?<\/p>\n

Sentient Cofounder Himanshu Tyagi is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science. He's also conducted foundational research on information theory, AI, and cryptography. Sentient Chief of Staff, Vivek Kolli, is a Princeton graduate with a background in consulting, \u201chelping a billion-dollar company [BCG] make another billion dollars\u201d before leaving college.<\/p>\n

Everyone working at Sentient is ridiculously intelligent. For that matter, so is everyone in AI. So, how much smarter will AGI (artificial general intelligence or God-like AI) be?<\/p>\n

While Elon Musk defines<\/a> AGI as \u201csmarter than the smartest human,\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cAGI is a weakly defined term, but generally speaking, we mean it to be a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems the definition of AGI is up for interpretation. Kolli ruminates:<\/p>\n

\u201cI don't know how smart it's going to be. I think it's a theoretical thing that we're reaching for. To me, AGI just means the best possible AI. And the best possible AI is what we're trying to build at Sentient.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tyagi reflects:<\/p>\n

\u201cAGI for us [Sentient] is nothing but multiple AIs competing and building on each other. That's what AGI for me is, and open AGI means that everybody can come and bring in their AI to make this AI better.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Money to burn, cash to flash: the billion-dollar paradox<\/h2>\n

Dubai-based Sentient Labs raised $85 million<\/a> in seed funding in 2024, co-led by Peter Thiel\u2019s Founders Fund (the same funders of OpenAI), Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures. Tyagi describes the flourishing AI development scene in the UAE, enthusing:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey [the UAE government] are putting a lot of money into AI, you know. All the mainstream companies did raises from the UAE, because they want to not only provide funding, but they also want to become the center of compute.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With lofty ambitions and deeper pockets, the Gulf states are throwing all their might behind AI development, with Saudi Arabia recently pledging $600 billion<\/a> to U.S. industries and $20 billion explicitly to AI data centers, and the UAE's AI market slated to reach $46.3 billion by 2031 (20%<\/a> of the country\u2019s GDP).<\/p>\n

Among the Big Tech behemoths, the talent war is in full swing, as megalomaniac founders salivate at the bit to build AGI first, offering $100 million<\/a> sign-on bonuses to experienced AI developers (who presumably never read the parable about the camel and the needle). These numbers have ceased to have meaning.<\/p>\n

When corporations and nation-states have money to burn and cash to flash, where is this all going? What happens if one country or Big Tech corporation builds AGI before another? According to Kolli:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing they will do is keep it for themselves\u2026 If just Microsoft or OpenAI controlled all the information that you go online for, that would be hell. You can't even imagine what it would be like\u2026 There's no incentive for them to share, and that leaves everyone else out of the picture\u2026 OpenAI controls what I know.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rather than the destruction of the human race, Sentient foresees a different problem, and it\u2019s the reason behind the company\u2019s existence: the race against closed-source AGI. Kolli explains:<\/p>\n

\u201cSentient is what OpenAI said they were going to be. They came onto the scene, and they were very mission-driven and said, \u201cWe're a completely non-profit. We're here for AI development.\u201d Then they started making a couple of bucks, and they realized they could make a lot more and went completely closed-sourced.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An open and shut case: why decentralization matters<\/h2>\n

Tyagi insists it doesn\u2019t have to be this way. AGI doesn\u2019t have to be centralized in the hands of one entity when everyone can be a stakeholder in the knowledge.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is the kind of technology that need not be winner-take-all because everybody has some reasoning and some information to contribute to it. There's no reason for a closed company to win. Open companies will win.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sentient envisions a world where thousands of AI models and agents, built by a decentralized global community, can compete and collaborate on a single platform. Anyone can contribute and monetize their AI innovations, creating shared ownership; as Kolli stated, what OpenAI should<\/em> have been.<\/p>\n

Tyagi gives me a brief TL;DR of AI development, and explains that everything used to be developed in the open until OpenAI got giddy on the greenbacks and battened down the hatches.<\/p>\n

\u201c2020 to 2023, these four years, were when the dominance of closed AI took over, and you kept hearing about this $20 billion valuation, which has now been normalized. The numbers have gone up. It's very scary. Now, it has become common to hear about $100 billion valuations.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With the world linking arms and singing Kumbaya<\/em> on one side and malevolent despots polishing their rings on the other, it\u2019s not hard to pick a side. But can anything go wrong developing this powerful technology in the open? I put the question to Tyagi:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the issues that you have to address is that now it's open source, it's wild, wild west. It can be crazy, you know, it may not be safe to use it, it may not be aligned with your interest to use it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

AI Alignment (or taming the wild, wild west)<\/h2>\n

Kolli provides some insight into how Sentient programs AI models to be safer and more aligned.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat's worked really well is this alignment training that we did. We took Meta's model, Llama, and then took off the guardrails, and decided to retrain it and to understand whatever loyalty we wanted. We made it pro-crypto and pro-personal freedom\u2026 We forced the model to think exactly like we wanted it to think… Then you just continue to retrain it until that loyalty is embedded.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is important, he explains, in many cases. For example, a crypto trader can hardly trust an AI bot built on top of an LLM programmed to be risk-averse when it comes to digital assets. He regales:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you asked ChatGPT six months ago, \u201cShould I have invested in Bitcoin in 2014?\u201d It would say, \u201cOh yeah, looking back, it would have been a good investment. But at that time, it was super risky. I don't think you should have done it.\u201d Any agent that's built on top of that now has that same thought process, right? You don't want that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He compares the alignment training of AI systems to the indoctrination of students in communist China, where even their math textbooks are subtly pro-CCP (Chinese Communist Party).<\/p>\n

\u201cThink about any country training their constituents to believe their agenda. The CCP doesn't tell someone at the age of 21 that they should be pro-China. They\u2019re brought up in that culture, even through their textbooks.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I understand the analogy, but it doesn\u2019t seem entirely foolproof to me. I point out that even the tightly controlled communist China has dissidents, and ask what Kolli thinks of the LLM that recently refused<\/a> to be shut down, bypassing the encoded instructions of its trainers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese stories are coming more and more frequently,\u201d he acknowledges. \u201cOne side issue I take is that the top labs are doing it knowingly because they want to maximize attention with their models.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, but if Sentient can take off the guardrails from a model and train in specific requirements, what\u2019s to stop a rogue state or garden variety terrorist from doing the same?<\/p>\n

\u201cOne, I don't think just anyone can do it just yet. It took our researchers quite a bit of time. And then, two, theoretically, they can do that, but there is some legal concern.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, but… Let\u2019s say the person has mad skills, unlimited funds, zero moral code, and no respect for legislation. Then what? He pauses:<\/p>\n

\u201cSentient is building an ecosystem where anyone can create AI tools, but with specific guardrails and safety protocols that all platform participants must follow. We can't control what loyalties others embed in models built outside our platform, but we can enforce responsible development standards within our ecosystem. Every actor has a responsibility to develop AI safely, and we're building the infrastructure to support that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unhinged llamas should come with a warning label<\/h2>\n

Tyagi embellishes on loyal AI, posing the question:<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you make sure that this open ecosystem that is coming together and giving you a great user experience, is also aligned with your interests? How does one get to an AI where different user groups or even individuals, and different political companies and countries get the AI that is aligned with what they want? We put down a Constitution for this AI. We detect, people detect, where the AI is deviating from that Constitution.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Constitutions are commonly used in AI. It\u2019s an approach to alignment developed by researchers at Anthropic to align AI systems with human values and ethical principles. They embed a predefined set of rules or guidelines (a “Constitution”) into the AI\u2019s training and operational framework.<\/p>\n

While Sentient doesn\u2019t have a Constitution, per se, the company releases explicit guidelines with its models, like the ones released<\/a> with the pro-crypto, pro-personal freedom \u201cMini Unhinged Llama\u201d model Kolli referred to earlier. Tyagi says:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the deeper part of the research that we do. But at the end, the goal is to give this one unified open AGI experience.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sentient also conducted some interesting research with EigenLayer, which benchmark-tested AI\u2019s ability to reason about corporate governance laws. By combining 79 diverse corporate charters with questions grounded in 24 established governance principles, the benchmark revealed considerable challenges for state-of-the-art models and the need for advanced legal reasoning and multi-step analysis in AI.<\/p>\n

While Sentient\u2019s work is promising, the industry has a long way to go when it comes to safety and alignment. The best guesstimates place alignment spend at just 3%<\/a> of all VC funding.<\/p>\n

When all we have left is the human connection<\/h2>\n

I press Tyagi to tell me what the end game of AI development is, and share my concerns about AI displacing jobs or even wiping out humanity completely. He pauses:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a philosophical question actually. It depends on how you see progress for humanity.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He compares AI to the Internet when it comes to displacing jobs, but points out that the Internet also created different kinds of roles.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think humans are high-agency animals. They will find other things to do, and the value will shift to that. I don't think value transfers to AI. So that I'm not worried about.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kolli answers the same question and agrees with me when I mention that some kind of UBI solution may be necessary in the not-too-distant future. He says:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you will see the gap widen a lot now between people who decided to take advantage of AI and people who didn't. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing\u2026 In three years, many people will look around and be like, \u201cWow, my job is gone now. What do I do?\u201d And it will be too late to try to take advantage of AI by that time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He continues:<\/p>\n

\u201cNow you see, I'm sure in your industry, when it's fully focused on writing, I think all journalists have left is to tap into the human connection with their writing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t like to be seen as a Luddite, but it\u2019s hard for me to be bullish on AI when I\u2019m staring down the barrel of my irrelevance daily, and all I have left in my arsenal is my humanity, after years of fine-tuning my craft.<\/p>\n

Yet, none of the people developing AI has a good answer to how humans should evolve. When Elon Musk was asked<\/a> what he would tell his kids about choosing a career in the era of AI, he replied:<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, that is a tough question to answer. I guess I would just say to follow their heart in terms of what they find interesting to do or fulfilling to do, and try to be as useful as possible to the rest of society.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/h2>\n

Humanity's Russian roulette: what happens next?<\/h2>\n

If anything is certain about what\u2019s to come, it\u2019s that the coming years will bring colossal change, and no one knows what that change will look like.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s estimated that more than 99%<\/a> of all the species that ever lived on earth have gone extinct. What about humanity? Are we in trouble here as architects of our own demise?<\/p>\n

The so-called Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, who quit his job with Google to warn people of the dangers, likens AGI to having a tiger cub as a pet. He says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really cute. It\u2019s very cuddly, very interesting to watch. Except that you better be sure that when it grows up, it never wants to kill you, because if it ever wanted to kill you, you\u2019d be dead in a few seconds.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Altman also shares an alarming possibility<\/a> about the worst-case scenario of AGI:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe good case is like so unbelievably good that you sound like a really crazy person to start talking about it. And the bad case, and I think this is, like, really important to say, is like lights out for all of us.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What does Tyagi think? He frowns:<\/p>\n

\u201cAI has to be kept loyal to the community and loyal to humanity, but that is an engineering problem.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An engineering problem? I interject. We\u2019re not talking about a software bug here, but the future of the human race. He insists:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must engineer powerful AI systems with the care of all the security. Security at the software level, at the prompt level, then at the model level, all the way, that has to keep up. I'm not worried about it\u2026 It's a very important problem, and most companies and most projects are looking at how to keep your AI safe, but it will be like Black Mirror, it will impact in a way that\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He trails off and changes tack, asking what I think of social media and children spending all their time online. He asks whether I consider it progress or a problem, then says:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, it's new, everything new of this kind is progress, and we have to cross that barrier and get to the next stage\u2026 I believe in the golden period of the future infinitely more than the golden period of the past. Technologies like AI, space, they open the unlimited possibilities of the future.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I appreciate his optimism and desperately wish that I shared it. But between being controlled by Microsoft, enslaved by North Korea, or obliterated by a rogue AI whose guardrails have been dismantled, I\u2019m just not so sure. At the very least, with so much at stake, it\u2019s a conversation we should be having out in the open, not behind closed doors or closed-source. As Hinton remarked:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019d be sort of crazy if people went extinct because we couldn\u2019t be bothered to try.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to\u00a0Slate Sundays, CryptoSlate\u2019s new weekly feature showcasing in-depth interviews, expert analysis, and thought-provoking op-eds that go beyond the headlines to explore the ideas and voices shaping the future of crypto. I had to hold two separate interviews with Sentient to sit with the information, digest it, and follow up. AI is not my area […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":487335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78326,77968,80230],"tags":[77040,78951,77761],"prediction_market_topic":[],"post_folder":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUtopia or dystopia? 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