The crypto bros are coming for AI

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At a crypto convention in 2021, Celsius co-founder and CTO Nuke Goldstein could barely contain his enthusiasm for the brave new world of the blockchain.

“When you work in crypto you are working on a rollercoaster, it’s fun but it’s crazy,” he said, in a video posted to Celsius’ YouTube channel. “But you wake up every morning and you know you are changing the world.”

Two years later, it’s fair to say that Goldstein has lost some of his enthusiasm for crypto.

Celsius went bankrupt in 2022, with some customers losing thousands of dollars in the process, and Goldstein now has a new job — as CEO of AI marketing startup Raver.AI, which promises to “unleash the power of AI.”

Goldstein is one of many figures in the world of cryptocurrency rapidly pivoting towards AI. With crypto funding drying up and the likes of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao in jail or facing criminal charges, many are now attempting to reinvent themselves in an attempt to cash in on the booming new technology.

In November, Paul Hsu, the founder of crypto-focused VC firm Decasonic, told The Wall Street Journal that of the 200 crypto startups the company reviews every week, around 20 are pivoting to AI.

Horacio Villalobos/Getty Images

“I think it’s been the natural progression for a lot of people after the crypto crash of the past year,” Jacob Silverman, a journalist and author who has covered the crypto industry extensively, told Business Insider. “A lot of it is just following the money.”

Adding fuel to the fire

AI is widely seen as a world-changing technology, with some warning that it could one day lead to the extinction of humanity.

Experts told Business Insider that the influx of crypto refugees could pour fuel onto the already fevered debate between those pushing for AI development to move even faster and those ensuring that the tech is being built responsibly.

“People in crypto certainly have a sense of mission, and some really do think that if you convert the world to Bitcoin you’ll somehow solve most of the world’s problems,” Silverman said.

“But that level of messianism and utopianism is really dialed up to 12 in AI. There’s a real sense that they think that they are doing something deeply important,” he added.

Guillaume Verdon is someone who fits that description. The former Google engineer founded his AI startup Extropic in 2022 with money partly raised from a side business in NFTs, per Forbes.

Verdon was recently revealed by Forbes to be one of the main advocates of the obscure Silicon Valley AI ideology known as effective accelerationism (often abbreviated to e/acc), writing on his X account under the pseudonym “Beff Jezos.”

Verdon told Forbes that the “Jezos” persona doesn’t reflect his real-world personality, describing himself as “just a gentle Canadian” who wants to “build a better future.”

Broadly, effective accelerationists believe in unchecked technological progress as quickly as possible, regardless of societal impact.

“The aim is to accelerate us into a kind of capitalist utopia, where technology is given free rein beyond regulation and control,” said Benjamin Noys, a professor of critical theory at the University of Chichester who has studied accelerationism extensively.

AI’s culture war

When it comes to AI, effective accelerationism means a headlong rush to create AGI or artificial general intelligence — a hypothetical AI model that would be far more intelligent than humanity. This stands in contrast to AI safety advocates who have warned that this could have devastating consequences.

As a result, e/acc adherents are often very anti-regulation, something they share with the crypto enthusiasts now flooding into the AI industry.

“There’s a strong overlap between the crypto folks and the e/acc folks,” Molly White, a former software engineer and crypto researcher, told BI.

“I think that ideology fits very well with parts of the crypto ideology, as well as the meme culture that was such a big part of crypto,” she added, alluding to the often toxic online discourse that saw crypto proponents regularly take aim at regulators and doubters.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has become a high-profile backer of e/acc. Steve Jennings/Getty Images

That overlap was readily apparent at a recent “unofficial official” afterparty for attendees of OpenAI’s developer day, which saw pop star Grimes DJ for a crowd of enthusiastic accelerationists under banners adorned with “accelerate or die” and the libertarian: “don’t tread on me” slogan that’s popular among crypto enthusiasts.

The party was partly sponsored by Extropic, according to Forbes, with Verdon attending and describing it as the beginning of “the SF cyberpunk AI counter-culture scene” in a Facebook post.

Fears for the future of AI

E/acc has gained some high-profile backers in the past year, including veteran investors and early crypto backers Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan.

This online ideology has also fuelled debates about how tech companies should develop AI safely, with advocates such as Verdon attacking the OpenAI board as “decelarists” standing in the way of AI progress after they temporarily removed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Noys warned that the ideology, with its emphasis on Terminator-style apocalypses and superintelligent machines, could supersede the very real, practical concerns surrounding AI with more unrealistic science-fiction scenarios.

“The big science fiction ideas are what makes accelerationism attractive. It’s got a kind of glamor and excitement that seems to attract these tech billionaires and intellectuals, it gives them a sense of philosophical status and power,” Noys said.

“I think the problem is that maybe the actual science and the actual kind of knowledge of things is going to get drowned by these discourses that have this science fiction appeal,” he added.

As Silicon Valley and the world grapple with these very real concerns, it seems unlikely that the influx of former crypto enthusiasts will do much to calm the AI’s brewing culture war.