Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said on Friday that he is no longer closely associated with the Future of Life Institute, the group that received SHIB tokens from him in 2021.
Buterin said the institute essentially provided him with a road map for mitigating existing risks, including those from artificial intelligence, biology and nuclear threats, along with broader pro-peace and epistemic initiatives. He said this helped to motivate the Shiba Inu Charity (SHIB).
Buterin said the institute later shifted to cultural and political advocacy around the dangers of AI, an approach he says differs from the strategy outlined at the time of the donation.
“My concern is that a large coordinated political operation with large pools of money is something that can easily lead to unintended outcomes, provoke reactions and solve problems in a way that is both authoritarian and vulnerable, even if it was not intended to be so in the first place,” he said.
Buterin expresses dissatisfaction with the current approach of the FLI
FLI describes its mission as reducing extreme risks and managing transformative technologies for the benefit of humanity.
“We need policies that allow AI development to improve lives everywhere, not just increase corporate profits,” the organization said on its website.
However, Buterin said some of the group’s proposals are aimed at placing safeguards in biosynthesis devices and AI models so that they stop producing harmful results.
“I see this as a very delicate solution: there are many ways to overcome these restrictions, regulatory or otherwise,” he said.
Cointelegraph reached out to FLI for comments, but did not receive a response from the publication.
related to: Vitalik says that “right now” his donations give better returns than investments
FLI donated $500 million from SHIB’s donation
In 2021, Buterin received a large amount of SHIB tokens and other dog tokens, as developers tried to use his name as a marketing tactic. He later donated some of these badges to charity.
FLI was one of the organizations that received tokens from Buterin. However, he said he did not expect the value of the donated tokens to reach nearly half a billion dollars.
“I thought they would definitely cash out $10-25 million at the most, because there’s no way the SHIB market is going to be deep enough to cash in more,” he said. “Instead, they were able to cash out $500 million.”
FLI announced in June 2021 that the $25 million multi-year grant program was made possible by the support of Buterin and the Shiba Inu community.
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