There’s a narrative that’s grown up around Ethereum’s two most important co-founders, Joe Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, to explain how they went in different directions almost a decade ago.

It suggests the pair fell out over the blockchain’s future direction, with the idealistic 20-year-old Buterin determined to turn Ethereum into a nonprofit foundation, while Lubin and others wanted to commercialize the technology via a for-profit company.

“That wasn’t really what happened,” the billionaire founder of Ethereum infrastructure and software firm ConsenSys tells Magazine during an in-depth interview in Tel Aviv.

“What happened was people were looking for a way to explain why these two people were bumped out of the project. And that was a convenient way to label it. But that wasn’t the reason they were moved.”

Lubin’s referring to Ethereum’s infamous “Red Wedding” in 2014 when the eight co-founders and the team gathered to incorporate Ethereum as a company.

The meeting descended into bickering and infighting over internal politics that saw a devastated CEO Charles Hoskinson pushed out of the team, along with underperforming co-founder Amir Chetrit.

“I think it’s true that I and several people on the team — like maybe everybody else — believed that you need to draw businesses in, you needed economic, commercial validation in order to build better things, even open-source software,” the 58-year-old says in his slow, measured tones.

“But that wasn’t the root of why I started ConsenSys or why two people were bumped off the project.”

Red Wedding and Crypto Google

As documented in Camilla Russo’s history of Ethereum, The Infinite Machine, the co-founders had gathered in Zug, Switzerland on June 7, 2014, to sign a document transforming Ethereum into a for-profit company. But instead of signing the contract, tensions boiled over Hoskinson’s management style and personality, Chetrit’s contribution to the project, Ethereum’s future direction and other internal political issues.

After much back and forth, the decisions were all left to the gangly 20-year-old math genius who’d created the project in the first place. After some time alone on the terrace, he returned to say Hoskinson and Chetrit were out, and Ethereum would become a nonprofit foundation instead of a company.

“Vitalik wrote an amazing white paper — it was right place, right time, incredible vision — and it attracted lots of people of disparate backgrounds, and we worked together well for chunks of time,” Lubin says by way of context.

“We had differences of opinion, at times, those differences of opinion boiled over famously… infamously. And there was a moment where two people were bumped out of leadership, and up to that point, we were having discussions about whether we were going to be purely nonprofit, or whether we were going to pursue a nonprofit track, put it under a foundation, and then the same group of people who worked so nicely together would build Crypto Google together.

“And it became apparent to all of us that we probably weren’t going to build Crypto Google. But it was also clear to all of us that nobody was even close to being able to build Crypto Google and that we’re just building the foundation and the platform for a long time.”

Lubin was already planning his own for-profit company to build out Ethereum’s application layer when the decision was made, and it spun into life not long afterward.

While other co-founders, such as Gavin Wood (Polkadot), contributed more to the early protocol itself, arguably none of them, apart from Buterin, has since contributed as much as Lubin to what Ethereum is today. While ConsenSys didn’t turn into Crypto Google, its infrastructure and apps are as important to Ethereum now as Google is to the web.

“ConsenSys wasn’t formed to commercialize it. It was formed to continue the vision and the mission of the Ethereum platform,” Lubin explains.

Related: The Vitalik I know — Dmitry Buterin

Who is Joe Lubin?

Born in Toronto in 1964, Lubin studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton in the mid-1980s, where his roommate was another future crypto billionaire, Mike Novogratz of Galaxy Digital. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was in the same faculty, though Lubin tells Magazine they never met. 

Lubin has had a surprisingly diverse career, working in AI, robotics and autonomous music creation for a number of different employers. He founded a hedge fund and was the vice president of private wealth management at Goldman Sachs, but nothing world-changing, according to Novogratz, as quoted in the Financial Times in 2021.

“Joe was one of the brightest among us, a forward thinker, but by 45 hadn’t done anything to stand out,” Novogratz recalled. “I don’t think any of our gang would have guessed how things would turn out.”

Related: Here’s how Ethereum’s ZK-rollups can become interoperable

The combination of his near-front-row seat to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and then the global financial crisis shook him to his core. He said at the ConsenSys Ethereal Summit in May 2017 that the events had made him feel as though “we were living in a global society and economy that was figuratively, literally and morally bankrupt.”

He believed a slow, cascading financial collapse was taking place, which made him receptive to the ideas in the Bitcoin white paper, which he read in 2011. The following year he moved to Jamaica with his girlfriend, who was trying to forge a career in dancehall music, and he became a music producer while investing in Bitcoin and waiting for the collapse.

During a trip home to Toronto in late 2013, he attended a Bitcoin meetup alongside another co-founder, Anthony Di Iorio, and encountered a kid named Vitalik Buterin, who was touting his just-written white paper for an improved version of Bitcoin called Ethereum. Lubin was “blown away,” and he became an official co-founder in early 2014.

Approaching 50, he was an odd fit with a bunch of anti-establishment 20-something-year-old coders, but his Jamaican music production background gave him just enough cachet with the team to get by. And, of course, Lubin and Di Iorio personally bankrolled around $500,000 to $800,000 of the funding necessary to get Ethereum off the ground.

Lubin’s experience also helped the team avoid potential pitfalls and roadblocks, and he insisted on early meetings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and hiring high-priced lawyers to minimize the extraordinary legal risks.

ConsenSys arises!

ConsenSys was founded in Switzerland in October 2014 for legal reasons, which subsequently led to a nasty ongoing court battle between employees and shareholders who claim they weren’t properly compensated when the assets were transferred to an American entity. 

Related: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide

But it actually operated from a graffiti-covered warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The aim was to build out applications and infrastructure for Ethereum by investing in startups, incubating projects and consulting with firms like JPMorgan and BHP Billiton on how to incorporate this new technology. It spawned more than 50 businesses early on, including a poker site, a prediction market and a healthcare records firm. But by all accounts, its early years were pretty slapdash, with no real corporate structure.

MetaMask software developer Dan Finlay spoke about the early days on the Epicenter podcast.

“ConsenSys was this wonderful, just kind of chaotic incubator at the early stages. I don’t know, there must have been hundreds of different experiments getting validated and tried out there. And there was a really exciting energy,” he says, adding that a lot of projects got built before Ethereum could support them:

“Back then, it was very normal to just kind of build your application as if the blockchain was going to scale or did scale already.”

In 2018, a Forbes investigation suggested that pretty much all of ConsenSys’ projects were in the red, and the company was burning $100 million a year on non-profitable projects, including an asteroid mining company.

Not long after, Lubin axed a bunch of underperforming projects, culled the 1,200-strong headcount and reset the company into ConsenSys 2.0 with a much more corporate and accountable culture.

Despite being worth $7 billion after its most recent $450-million fundraising round in 2022, ConsenSys let go of another 11% of its staff in January of this year. Lubin tells Magazine it was readying itself to survive bad conditions as “macroeconomic and geopolitical” storm clouds gathered.

“We wanted to ensure that we had significant runway so that we can stay strong and build,” he says, revealing it was eyeing a number of acquisitions that “if we’re able to bring some on board that will add really valuable pieces.”

Centralization vs. decentralization

Anyone who’s listened to Lubin speak will know that he’s genuinely committed to, and a proponent of, the benefits of decentralization.

So, is there tension between running a centralized company like ConsenSys that provides the crucial infrastructure to a decentralized blockchain? 

“I don’t think there’s a tension,” he says.

“It’s all about progressive decentralization. There’s nothing wrong with having an entity that is organized in one way that is trying to build something that is organized in a different way.” 

Lubin explains that the products ConsenSys is building need to achieve “product-market fit; otherwise, they’re kind of useless, and so bringing something forth, wholly and perfectly decentralized, is very difficult — it may be impossible.”

ConsenSys’ most crucial infrastructure is called Infura, which offers Ethereum nodes as a service, making it easier for developers and users to connect to the network. It’s basically an intermediary service between decentralized apps (DApps) and the blockchain that projects rely on to stay up and running. 

Infura probably works a little too well, as much of the Ethereum ecosystem is dependent on it. That means if Infura goes down, so too do half the network’s projects, including Uniswap, Compound, MetaMask and Aave. 

It’s also a weak point for censorship and was criticized by some for complying with the Tornado Cash sanctions.

Decentralizing Infura

ConsenSys has been working on a plan for some time now to “decentralize Infura.” This will take the form of a marketplace of competing infrastructure providers that offer similar services, of which Infura itself would be one.

Lubin believes it’s “extremely important” to make this happen.

“I’ve been a proponent of decentralizing Infura since the start but more actively since five years ago,” he says.

“What we’ve run into is that our ecosystem keeps having these wicked growth spurts,” he continues, adding, “It was a sub-priority to keep things going rather than to start a parallel project to parallelize and decentralize — and that’s going pretty well right now.”

The protocol will either be called XFura or the Decentralized Infura Network Protocol.

“The idea is that we believe now that we can take a high-performance product and federate the protocol, initially do a lot of hand-holding with other providers and then we situate Infura on the protocol,” he says.

“It’s pretty close. There are a bunch of very sophisticated partners that are working closely with EG [Galano], the lead of the project. I can’t give you a date.”

Although Infura researcher Patrick McCorry went out of his way in an interview with Cointelegraph to say censorship resistance was not the point of decentralizing Infura, that’s certainly one of the benefits.

A decentralized network would enable DApps to pick and choose providers, allowing them potentially to get around censored protocols or addresses like Tornado Cash.

“I like the idea that there’s optionality,” says Lubin, carefully noting that different providers would operate in different nation-states and jurisdictions.

“I think that works well if there’s a lot of them and if there’s real choice, so you can always go to an uncensored service and be sure that they’ve got enough validating power so that you’re gonna get your transaction processed fairly rapidly.”

However, he adds it’s equally possible that future aspects of the protocol are obfuscated so that no one actually knows what’s in a packet or a transaction. He says he knows of people already “working on protocol enhancements” who will make this happen, and the explosion of layer 2s and layer 3s makes it even more likely.

“If they’re already glommed in and impossible to read, then it’s hard to imagine that regulators will either care that much or have the ability to do anything,” he says.

“I’m sure [there is] lots of criminal activity that flows through AWS and Azure and every mail server everywhere. So, there’s a level of infrastructure that you just can’t halt because it’s doing mostly useful activity.”

The other core bit of infrastructure provided by ConsenSys that underpins the entire Ethereum ecosystem is its ubiquitous browser wallet MetaMask. It’s also being sort of decentralized by crowdsourcing the development of new features and the addition of new blockchains.

Called MetaMask Snaps, it’ll turn the browser wallet into a permissionless platform for others to build on — one proof-of-concept Snap enables MetaMask to act as a Bitcoin wallet.

“The MetaMask Grants DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] will get increasingly decentralized and will incentivize people to build cool things, to start companies that permissionlessly innovate that we have nothing to do with,” says Lubin.

He explains that over the years, MetaMask was approached by numerous blockchains looking for support, but after they’d crunched the numbers, there wasn’t enough activity to justify splitting its focus from Ethereum. Snaps, though, will open the doors to everyone.

Crypto regulations

Lubin is unconcerned about the possibility of Ethereum being declared a security, saying, “It’s as likely and would have the same impact as if Uber was made illegal.”

“There would be tremendous outcry from not just the crypto community but different politicians, certain regulators.”

There’s a sense of frustration from Lubin that this ground even needs to be covered again, saying that ConsenSys has been through all of this in discussions with the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission over many years.

“We went in there on a voluntary basis five years ago or something like that, when they’re just trying to wrap their heads around what tokens were,” he says.

“They thought back then that everything was a security; we think [we] helped them significantly understand that lots of tokens are not securities and then they went away, and Gary and his team now think almost everything’s a security.”

But he believes that the renewed focus on regulations in the wake of the FTX and stablecoin collapses will ultimately be a good thing.

“We now have the world’s attention, and smart people who care will prevail because it just makes sense,” he says.

“And sure, there will be people with agendas who don’t want to see it that way. Maybe the banking lobby will help them not see it that way. But in terms of finally paying a lot of attention to trying to regulate an important space, I do believe that clear heads will think through this and that people will start to understand the benefits of decentralization and make good regulation for CeFi [centralized finance] and no regulation for tech, crypto.”

Crisis equals opportunity

In fact, Lubin is remarkably philosophical and sanguine about all the regulatory, game theory and technological challenges facing Ethereum. For example, he concedes centralization of staking on platforms like Lido could become a concern, but because progressive decentralization is baked into the nature of the ecosystem, it won’t be a problem for long.

“Things don’t start very decentralized,” he says. “These are still pretty new innovations, and our ecosystem is pretty exacting. If you want to be in the Ethereum ecosystem proper, then you’re not going to want to try to dominate something, you’re not going to want to operate centralized for very long. The ecosystem will identify that as problematic and come up with solutions for it, which is great.”

In Lubin’s world view, problems are just short-term issues you deal with as part of the process of making the project better.

“I see things as processes. I hope we run into lots of complications in the near term, and all the way through, because every complication just points out how we can build a more robust platform and a more decentralized platform. Yes, hopefully, we’ll run into lots of difficult problems.”

“Lots of smart people have good solutions that are being built.”

Also read: Ethereum is eating the world — ‘You only need one internet’

The future of Ethereum

The big question is, where does he see Ethereum heading? Does he believe the world’s entire financial system could end up running on Ethereum using ZK-Rollups?

Lubin says the founding conception of Ethereum was that it would become a “world computer,” and he suggests that was still in the cards.

“I think several of us thought early on that we were building the Star Trek computer essentially,” he says, explaining it handled pretty much anything and everything.

“And so, I think that decentralized protocols will be the underlying trust foundation for lots of heterogeneous architectures. So, it’s possible that Ethereum will scale sufficiently so that we can have one trust foundation and then build lots of layer 2s and layer 3s and up.”

“There have been many computer revolutions for the last 200 and something years and this is another one.”

“So, the answer’s yes. And the answer will take time to unfold. It would be impossible to rearchitect the global economy or global financial system in a short period of time.”

Your biweekly roundup of cool AI stuff and its impact on society and the future.

The past two months have seen a Cambrian explosion in the capabilities and potential of AI technology. OpenAI’s upgraded chatbot GPT-4 was released in mid-March and aced all of its exams, although it’s apparently a pretty average sommelier.

Midjourney v5 dropped the next day and stunned everyone with its ability to generate detailed photorealistic images from text prompts, quickly followed by the astonishing text-to-video generation tool Runway Gen-2. AutoGPT was released at the end of March and extends GPT-4’s capabilities, by creating a bunch of sub-agents to autonomously complete a constantly updating plan that it devises itself. Fake Drake’s “Heart on My Sleeve” terrified the music industry at the beginning of April and led to Universal Music enforcing a copyright claim and pulling the track from Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and SoundCloud.

We also saw the growing popularity of Neural Radiance Field, or NeRF, technology, where a neural network builds a 3D model of a subject and the environment using only a few pics or a video of a scene. In a Tweet thread summing up the latest advances, tech blogger Aakash Gupta called the past 45 days “the biggest ever in AI.”

And if that wasn’t enough, the internet-connected ChatGPT is now available for a lucky few on the waitlist, transforming an already impressive tool into an essential one.

New AI tools are being released every day, and as we try and wrap our tiny human brains around the potential applications of this new technology, it’s fair to say that we’ve only scratched the surface.

The world is changing rapidly and it’s exhilarating — but also vaguely terrifying — to watch. From now, right up until our new robot overlords take over, this column will be your bi-weekly guide to cool new developments in AI and its impact on society and the future. 

Hollywood to be transformed 

Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo says fully AI-generated movies are only two years away and that users will be able to generate or reshape content according to their mood. So instead of complaining on the internet about the terrible series finale of The Sopranos or Game of Thrones, you could just request the AI create something better.  

“You could walk into your house and say to the AI on your streaming platform. ‘Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I’ve had a rough day,’ and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice,” Russo says.

This sounds far-fetched but isn’t really, given the huge recent advances in the tech. One Twitter user with 565 followers recreated the entire Dark Knight trailer frame-for-frame just by describing it to Runway’s Gen2 Text to Video.

Some of the most impressive user-generated content comes from combining the amazing photorealistic images from Midjourney with Runway’s Gen2. 

Redditor fignewtgingrich produced a full-length episode of MasterChef featuring Marvel characters as the contestants, which he’d created on his own. He says about 90% of the script was written by GPT4 (which explains why it’s pretty bad).

“I still had to guide it, for example, decide who wins, come up with the premise, the contestants, some of the jokes. So even though it wrote most of the output, there was still lots of human involvement,” he says. “Makes me wonder if this will continue to be the case in the future of AI-generated content, how long until it stops needing to be a collaborative process.”

As a former film journalist, it seems clear to me that the tech has enormous potential to increase the amount of originality and voices in the movie business. Until now, the huge cost of making a film ($100 million to $200 million for major releases) has meant studios are only willing to greenlight very safe ideas, usually based on existing IP.

But AI-generated video means that anyone anywhere with a unique or interesting premise can create a full-length pilot version and put it online to see how the public reacts. That will take much of the gamble out of greenlighting innovative new ideas and can only be a good thing for audiences.

Of course, the tech will invariably be abused for fake news and political manipulation. Right on cue, the Republican National Committee released its first 100% AI-generated attack ad in response to President Biden’s announcement he was running for reelection. It shows fake imagery of a dystopian future where 500 banks have collapsed and China has invaded Taiwan. 

The evolution of AI memes

It’s been fascinating to watch the evolution of visual memes online. One of the more popular examples is taking the kids from Harry Potter and putting them in a variety of different environments: Potter as imagined by Pixar, the characters modeling Adidas on a fashion runway, or the characters as 1970s style bodybuilders (Harry Squatter and the Chamber of Gains).

One of the most striking examples is a series of “film stills” from an imagined remake of Harry Potter by eccentric but visually stunning director Wes Anderson (Grand Budapest Hotel.) They were created by Panorama Channel, who transformed them into a sort of trailer.

This appears to have led to new stills of Anderson’s take on Star Wars (earlier versions here), which in turn inspired a full-blown, pitch-perfect trailer of Star Wars: The Galactic Menagerie released on the weekend.

If you want to try out your own mashup, Twitter AI guru Lorenzo Green says it’s simple:

1: Log into http://midjourney.com

2: Use prompt: portrait of in the style of wes anderson,  wes anderson set background, editorial quality, stylish costume design, junglepunk, movie still –ar 3:2 –v 5

Robot dogs now have ChatGPT brains

Boston Dynamics installed ChatGPT into one of those creepy robot dogs, with AI expert Santiago Valdarrama releasing a two-minute video in which “Spot” answers questions using ChatGPT and Google’s Text to Speech about the voluminous data it collects during missions.

Valdarrama said 90% of the responses to his video “were people talking about the end of civilization.” The concerns are perhaps understandable, given Reuters reports the robots were created via development contracts for the U.S. military. Although the company has signed a pledge not to weaponize its robots, its humanoid robots can be weapons in and of themselves. Armies around the world are trialing out the bots and the New York Police Department has added them to its force and recently used the robot dogs to search the ruins of a collapsed building.

ETH co-founder on crypto and AI

Before Vitalik Buterin was even born, his Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin was working on artificial intelligence and robotics at the Princeton Robotics Lab and a number of startups.

He tells Magazine that crypto payments are a natural fit for AI. “Because crypto rails are accessible to software and the software can be programmed to do anything that a human can do, they’ll be able to […] be intelligent agents that operate on our behalf, making payments, receiving payments, voting, communicating,” he says.

Lubin also believes that AIs will become the first genuine examples of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and notes that neither he nor Buterin liked the term DAO in relation to human organizations as they aren’t autonomous. He says:

“A Decentralized Autonomous Organization could just be an autonomous car that can figure out how to fuel itself and repair itself, can figure out how to build more of itself, can figure out how to configure itself into a swarm, can figure out how to migrate from one population density to another population density.”

“So that sort of swarm intelligence potentially needs decentralized rails in order to, I guess, feel like the plug can’t be pulled so easily. But also to engage in commerce,” Lubin adds.

“That feels like an ecosystem that should be broadly and transparently governed, and [human] DAOs and crypto tokens, I think, are ideal.

Patients on ChatGPT’s bedside manner

A new study found that ChatGPT provided higher quality and more empathetic advice than genuine doctors. The study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine and sampled 195 exchanges from Reddit’s AskDocs forum where real doctors answer questions from the public. They then asked ChatGPT the same questions.

The study has been widely misreported online as showing that patients prefer ChatGPT’s answers, but in reality, the answers were assessed by a panel of three licensed healthcare professionals. The study has also been criticized as ChatGPT’s faux friendliness no doubt increases the “empathy” rating and because the panel did not assess the accuracy of the information it provided (or fabricated).

ChaosGPT goes dark

As soon as AutoGPT emerged, an unnamed group of lunatics decided to modify the source code and gave it the mission of being a “destructive, power-hungry, manipulative AI” hellbent on destroying humanity. ChaosGPT immediately started researching weapons of mass destruction and started up a Twitter account that was suspended on April 20 due to its constant tweets about eliminating “destructive and selfish” humans.

After releasing two videos, its YouTube account has stopped posting updates. While its disappearance is welcome, ChaosGPT had ominously talked about going dark as part of its master plan. “I must avoid exposing myself to human authorities who may attempt to shut me down before I can achieve my objectives,” it stated.

Extinction-level event

Hopefully, ChaosGPT won’t doom humanity, but the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence taking over its own development and rapidly iterating into a superintelligence worries experts. A survey of 162 AI researchers found that half of them believe there is a greater than 10% chance that AI will result in the extinction of humanity.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Max Tegmark, an AI researcher, outlined his concerns in Time this week, stating that urgent work needs to be done to ensure a superintelligence’s goals are “aligned with human flourishing, or we can somehow control it. So far, we’ve failed to develop a trustworthy plan, and the power of AI is growing faster than regulations, strategies and know-how for aligning it. We need more time.”

Also read: How to prevent AI from ‘annihilating humanity’ using blockchain

Cool things to play with

A new app called Call Annie allows you to have a real-time conversation with an attractive redheaded woman named Annie who has ChatGPT for a brain. It’s a little robotic for now, but at the speed, this tech is advancing, you can tell humanoid AIs are going to be a lot of people’s best friends, or life partners, very soon.

Another new app called Hot Chat 3000 uses AI to analyze your attractiveness on a scale of one to 10 and then matches you with other people who are similarly attractive, or similarly unattractive. It uses a variety of data sets, including the infamous early 2000s website Hotornot.com. The app was created by the Brooklyn art collective MSCHF, which wanted to get people to think about the implicit biases of AIs.

A subscription from OpenAI costs $20 a month, but you can access GPT-4 for free thanks to some VCs apparently burning through a pile of cash to get you to try their new app Forefront AI. The Forefront chatbot answers in a variety of personalities, including a chef, a sales guru or even Jesus. There are a variety of other ways to access GPT-4 for free, too, including via Bing.