AI to Rescue Ethereum: Buterin’s Vision for Technical Fixes

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted on Monday about the benefits of AI (artificial intelligence) applications to find flaws in the coding base.

Buterin showed his enthusiasm through a post on February 19, which said, “One application of AI that I am excited about is AI-assisted formal verification of code and bug finding.”. He further also added that “Right now, Ethereum’s biggest technical risk is bugs in code and anything that significantly changes that would be amazing”.

Vitalik Buterin was not always optimistic about AI, as earlier in November he wrote in a blog post referring to AI as a threat to all of humanity. He explained that being open source could be high risk and work against humans. He also said that cryptocurrency and AI may overlap, creating further problems.

Buterin’s latest comment and excitement about AI come as Ethereum failed to implement Dencum, its latest update. Dencum is the highly anticipated update to Ethereum and is slated to be launched in March. It was put on test in January, but a bug called Prsym held for four hours on the testnet network to finalize the process. Thus, Buterin thinks that Ethereum requires these crucial upgrades for a smooth and long-term roadmap for the blockchain industry.

On the contrary, few believe that AI is a reliable tool to detect bugs. For instance, the experiments conducted in July 2023 by Openzeppelin concluded that AI has led to the invention of new vulnerability issues that were not present in the first place. These experiments were done on Chat GPT-4, a similar model language to Ethereum.

However, there are a few people, like Nansen analyst Sandra Leow, who see that if AI and Web 3 are used in combination, it could lead to a very flourishing cryptocurrency market by 2024. He also said, “We could foresee a world where AI agents become a primary category of users on the blockchain, and some examples include verification management applications that use zero-knowledge learning technologies like Modulus Labs.”.

Buterin’s tweet on Monday, February 19, has led to the opening of new fields of artificial intelligence for blockchain markets like Ethereum. We hope that AI will prove to be a boon for Ethereum and its cofounder, Vitalik Buterin.