person
Vitalik Buterin
Ethereum co-founder; author of 'My techno-optimism' manifesto
Crypto founder who has written extensively on AI as a civilisational risk and coined 'd/acc' (defensive/decentralised accelerationism) as a third path between unconditional acceleration and the pause framing.
Profile
expertise
Deep technical
Sustained peer-reviewed contribution to ML, alignment, interpretability, or safety techniques. Could review a frontier paper.
Inventor of Ethereum. Cryptography and mechanism-design depth. AI engagement is via 'd/acc' framing, substantive but adjacent to ML proper.
recognition
Household name
Name recognition outside the AI/CS community. Featured by mainstream press, a Wikipedia page in many languages, a published bestseller, or holds a position the lay public knows.
Defining public figure of crypto. Repeated mainstream press. Wikipedia in 70+ languages.
vintage
Scaling era
Worldview formed during GPT-2/3, scaling laws, Anthropic's founding. Pre-ChatGPT but post-deep-learning. The 'scale is all you need' debate is live.
Ethereum 2014. Active AI engagement begins ~2022 with d/acc framing, squarely in the scaling era.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
p(doom)
- 10%2023-11-28
Tweet from Vitalik Buterin · X/Twitter
Strategy positions
Differential technologyendorses
Preferentially develop protective technology over dangerousCoined 'd/acc' in his 2023 post 'My techno-optimism': prefer defensive, decentralised, democratic, differential technology development.
“I think we should be much more wary of superintelligent AI than we are. I recently calibrated that my actual p(doom) is something like 10%.”
Build tech that differentially accelerates defense against catastrophic risk over attack.
Context: Core thesis of 'My techno-optimism'.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Vitalik Buterin's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.