Content bloke, @rwasummit. Cofounder, @aai_society, Co-Author: Our Biggest Fight,The Age of Cryptocurrency + 4 other books. Ex- @CoinDesk, @MediaLab, @WSJ
New York
Joined November 2009
- Tweets20.2K
- Following3.6K
- Followers35.7K
- Likes15K
I came in as an advisor to the team behind Kōhai because they were doing vital work making open weight AI accessible and operational.
It turns out they were also building something as - if not more - important on top of that open model base: tools that help humans work TOGETHER.
Humanity's superpower has always been our ability to coordinate and collaborate with each other - read Ronald Coase or Yuval Harari. It's what took us from tribe to settlement to city to nation. It's the very stuff of civilization.
Hyperpersonalized AI agents might empower the individual but they run the risk of destroying the collective interest resulting in net value loss.
This is nothing short of a threat to civilization. Kōhai is countering it with AI tools that help humans better work as teams - and they're doing so in the very setting that has traditionally created the most value: the workplace.
Try it out!
Work is multiplayer.
AI is single-player.
That’s why AI at work is broken.
So we built Kōhai: one workspace where your team and its AI teammates share context and get the work done.
Live today. First 1,000 users free 👇
kohai.co/kohai-launch
Much legit focus on crypto for AI - @HaunVentures raised $1B on it - but use case definition is flimsy. Now my brilliant @advancedaisociety colleague @BWarburg opens eyes to an indisputable value prop: the broader agentic security lessons from a decade of on-chain bot attacks.
We are all crypto now!
Truly an amazing, must-read essay.
This is why you should apply NOW to attend @rwasummit. While limited seats remain. rwasummit.io/brooklyn-2026
There, the who's who of DeFi and TradFi map out this financial revolution's path - including this wild "flippening" in RWA vs crypto perps.
And... @jerallaire is keynoting!
This is absolutely a tipping point
It’s also reflective of the financial system fully making a move onto the Internet
We will look back at this time in 2026 as one of the biggest turning points in the history of our industry
9
19
1,942
Brilliant analysis of an historic moment in computer science - measured, recognizing the import of what just happened, but also offering a non-alarmist assessment of actions that can be taken. Bravo, @drakefjustin
Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.
On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.
But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!
As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.
Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.
Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.
Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!
The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)
Part 2: neutral atoms and qday
The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.
Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.
Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.
My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".
Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.
So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.
Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.
Part 3: post-quantum cryptography
There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.
These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.
The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.
Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.
24
54
2,928
Wherein @ccatalini, @xianghui90 and @wu_jane give birth to an entirely new - and vitally important - field of economic inquiry: the cost of human verification.
As they compellingly demonstrate, this cost barrier is now the biggest and most fundamental constraint on AI scalability.
People following our work to build awareness and activate market adoption of a new "Proof of Control" category of technologies, will understand the relevance of Christian's and his co-authors' work.
This is not just about the moral and ethical imperatives for keeping "humans in the loop" - I much prefer "humans in charge," btw - though that is also critical. It's about the economics of it.
By extension, the single most valuable thing you can be working on right now is the field of AI verification solutions.
6
6
499
Inspired by @steipete's big exit with @OpenAI:
As Agentic AI Acclerates, Let's Take a Stand for Human Agency
Come to #HumanAuthorized in Napa next week. See replies for link
linkedin.com/pulse/agentic-a… via @LinkedIn
4
5
560
Nice to see the buzz building around our #HumanAuthorized
California AI Summit Tackles Human Control Over Machines
thecurrencyanalytics.com/alt… via @thecurrencyA
At @AAI_Society and H2H, we have been privileged to count on the tremendous support of the @linuxfoundation for our one-of-kind event, Human-Authorized: The Summit on Human Agency.
events.linuxfoundation.org/s…
This quoted post is unavailable.
3
11
1,470
We have AI agents (kind of) forming their own social media network. There are AI-generated videos everywhere, including the news. We hear of privacy breaches daily, each more sophisticated as fewer human engineers are writing code.
Bottom line: we urgently need a workable framework for delegation authority, one that ensures people and the businesses they represent can verifiably assert control over AI agents.
I’m calling for unity among tech builders, industry and civil society on this. Let’s fix this!
Whenever we mention this “Proof of Control” concept, we hear resounding support – not just because people fear the worst if AI gets out of control, but also, more positively, because they know a safe, privacy-preserving approach to data is necessary if agentic AI is to deliver on its sweeping innovation promises.
That’s why H2H and @AAI_Society are excited – and just a little daunted – to launch HUMAN-AUTHORIZED: THE SUMMIT ON HUMAN AGENCY. Occurring one day before the annual The @linuxfoundation Member Summit on Feb. 23 in Napa Valley, it is the first step in getting everyone to the table on this vital mission. (In the first comment, you’ll find the press release that went out today.)
In socializing this, many people have shared learnings from decades of work trying to resolve thorny problems of identity, privacy and decentralized trust. They’ve reminded me, for example, of the difficult trade-off between robust privacy and open-source standards, and of the challenges in translating human law concepts such as “fiduciary responsibility” to autonomous, machine-learning bots.
We are grateful for this input and humbly acknowledge that we definitely do not have anywhere near all the answers. What I DO know is that this framework must arise out of a multi-stakeholder, consensus-building exercise that's done to serve the interests of all humanity. We need tech companies, enterprises, financial institutions, standards bodies, educators, civic organizations and policymakers to all contribute to this process.
So, if you fit the bill, please apply to join the curated audience. Supported by @affinidi, @Google, @FaceTecInc and @midnightfdn and in partnership with @lfdecentralized, the event not only boasts a star-studded speaker lineup but also offers attendees a chance to experiment with cutting-edge tools for privately managing their data, social relationships and AI agent instructions.
The analogy I keep landing on is that we're witnessing the evolution of a new, digital species, one that operates very differently from ours. We humans must figure out how to safely coexist with it before WE become the next extinction event.
@cshirky @baratunde @mdennedy_ @programmer @ScottStornetta @glenngore @drummondreed @triciawang @danielabarbosa @ReedAlbergotti @jeffwilser @BenChristensen_ @shyamnagarajan @WSeltzer @DSearls @brianbehlendorf
The press release that went out today: events.linuxfoundation.org/s…
1
9
901
This was a wild conversation.
Thanks for having me on, @laurashin
@DMattin is a great, outside-the-box thinker, and it sounds like you found the ideal job for him, @RaoulGMI!
What is left when AI runs it all?
In this @Unchained_pod, @mikejcasey and @DMattin join me to discuss:
💡 How Moltbook points to where the AI meta is headed
😬 How AI could impact jobs
❕️ Which country is best positioned to win the AI race
⁉️ What a post-human economy looks like
👀 Which jobs survive in a post-human economy
Timestamps:
🚀 0:29 Introduction
🧏♂️ 2:10 How the Moltbook saga offers a window into where the AI meta could be headed
🤔 9:29 Why Michael wants a sovereign AI model
🌎 17:42 How AI could impact jobs
⚠️ 25:31 How AI could have a worse effect on the mental health young people than social media
❕️ 30:27 Which country is best positioned to win the AI race?
📍 35:02 What money looks like in a post-human economy
🤔 52:00 Which jobs flourish in a post-human economy?
💡 1:00:33 Michael and David share tokens and projects they find intriguing
Diligent building of robust tech that meets the needs of a rules-bound real estate industry has put @PropyInc in the pole position to transform it.
Once these rollup acquisitions are completed, the title industry will never be the same.
Proud to be an advisor to the amazing @NataliePropy and her team.
Today Bloomberg is breaking the news: Propy raised $100M to scale our AI-led roll-up.
Progress is slow - until it’s sudden.
For years, we built for durability, not speed.
One belief never changed: making homeownership easier requires infrastructure - and blockchain plus AI is how you build it.
We built the full stack first - and proved it in the real world, processing over $5B in transactions.
Only after that did we announce our AI-led roll-up strategy - and today, the capital behind it.
AI gives us access to fragmented data. Blockchain gives us the trust layer. Roll-up gives us distribution. Together, this allows to re-engineer how the largest asset class moves and unlock the American Dream at scale.
The capital will allow us to acquire $100M worth of profitable title companies nationwide, processing over $10bn txs annually, and onboard them to the Propy platform.
I’m deeply grateful to the Propy team for relentless execution, and to our newest teammate, @agent_avery, for raising the bar on what closings can look like.
A new era starts now.
3
11
796
Livecast of @AAI_Society's Patchworks event, convening people & orgs developing agentic AI standards & protocols - our cat-herding effort to get these brilliant but fragmented builders to sync.
Without coordination, agentic AI can't happen, and AI won't be optimized for shared prosperity
AAI Society Hosts Patchworks, a seminar for developers to sync on AI standards nitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1MnxnPZwN…
AAI Society Hosts Patchworks, a seminar for developers to sync on AI standards nitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1MnxnPZwN…
On now. (This time with the X and other infra tech working well, it seems...)
Listen in for an update on @AAI_Society's vital "Proof of Control" work, via a convo with my buddy @DougSurrealAi, hosted by @CryptoVonDoom and @HelloBenWhite
MONDAY 8AM PT!!!
FYI 119 w/ me and @HelloBenWhite - chatting with @mikejcasey about AI Security.
Sponsored by @wirenetwork and @0xVDEX. Link 👇🏼
This time we're on! No more internet infra hurdles outside of our control. 🤞
Join me and @DougSurrealAi tomorrow for a journey into decentralized AI with @CryptoVonDoom and @HelloBenWhite.
Let’s try this again. Come join us on @CryptoVonDoom and @HelloBenWhite spaces Monday at 10am CT 🎙️
With the legendary @mikejcasey and @DougSurrealAi ✊
Set your reminder 👉 nitter.cf/i/spaces/1eaKbjVZOpBKX
4
12
789
Looking forward to joining my new friend, @dehypokriet, on what appears to be a passions-stirring regular Space :).
We'll talk about the @AAI_Society, why everyone needs "proof of control" over AI, and how that's manifesting in @caffeineai .
This Post is from an account that no longer exists. Learn more
Starting in 7 minutes.
Do join in!
FYI 118 w/ me and @HelloBenWhite 🔋 by @wirenetwork and @0xVDEX.
After the AI Bubble: Who Really Owns Intelligence?
Guests: @mikejcasey Chairmen of @AAI_Society.
Join us:
nitter.cf/i/spaces/1mrGmBRWqjwJy
2
4
615
We're all excited about the agentic economy, but there's a problem: Both mainstream AI and decentralized AI ecosystems are incredibly fragmented across (potentially) incompatible systems, protocols and aspiring tech standards. Agents need consistency, they need interoperability, they need TRUST THAT CAN SCALE.
We gotta sync, people!
The first step to finding common ground so that this open, interoperable system of communication, coordination and exchange can grow and thrive in the interests of EVERYONE is for the builders to talk to each other. There's no better organization than the @AAI_Society to do that.
That's why I'm thrilled that @triciawang has spearheaded this initiative to get the Web2 and Web3 communities talking among each other and to each other, sharing information, discovering where the blockers are, and finding ways to collaborate in the name of reaching solutions.
Join us on December 10!
Everyone’s shipping. But are we syncing?
We’re hosting an impt online gathering: Patchwork: Syncing on AI Standards, Wed.December 10
7:30–12pm PST | 10:30–2pm EST | 5:30–9pm CET | 12:30-4am SGT
2
8
778