vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin)

Impressive work! For comparison, an H100 can do roughly 100-200 tok/s of Muse 30B for raw inference single-thread, going up to low thousands of tok/s with a large number of threads - and I am sure that for the massively-multi-threaded case they can optimize the prover further. So we roughly, sort of, have single-digit (<10x) overhead for LLM proving! Next step is getting single-digit overheads for FHE, and then ultimately vFHE (aka STARK * FHE). A crazy ambitious milestone given present FHE overheads, but because of how highly structured and almost-linear LLM inference is, it's closer to the realm of possibility than you might think. Single-digit-overhead all the things.

Yabloko, Russia's only remaining openly anti-war political party, was just banned. Also recently, Nadezhdin (from a different party) had to flee to France: Looks like the last traces of political opposition are being removed leading up to the legislative election next month.

I updated my 2023 roadmap diagram to overlay where the items that were there sit in the current Strawmap ( ). In general, a lot of overlap, but: * Some things got reshuffled in order (eg. quantum safety up-prioritized) * Some things deprioritized (eg. VDFs; many EVM improvements) * Some things replaced with superior constructions (eg. Verkle -> unified BT -> PBT; state expiry -> new state types) What's most striking, however, is that some completely new things are in the strawmap that are NOT in this diagram, because they were not in the 2023 roadmap at all. These reflect changing priorities. Notably: * First-class attention to strong privacy. This covers: keyed nonces and recent roots, aspects of FOCIL, lean privacy pool & wormholes * Aggressive scaling in the context of post-quantum. This covers: leanSPHINCS signatures and aggregation, zkzk frames (see ) * Lean-ification of the spec, to assist in formal verification (full FV of everything is only possible because of modern AI) * Blob and gas futures (this idea just didn't exist back in 2023) * Native rollups (SNARKs were nowhere near mature enough to even consider this back in 2023) * A more open design space for the "future of the EVM". zkzk frames already implies that the protocol will expose to users some ISA that's not the EVM - current leading candidates are leanISA and RISC-V. These ISAs are more simple, modern and efficient than the EVM. Once they're there, why not expose them to developers everywhere? (And then, why not turn the EVM into being an IR on top of that ISA, instead of an enshrined feature massively complicating the base protocol?) Though much of the deeper exploration here is too early even for the strawmap. * New state types are not just a replacement for expiry, they're a fundamentally different paradigm to how Ethereum does scaling A common theme in scaling, found in both state types and zkzk frames (both new ideas), is that instead of trying to maximally scale ALL ethereum activity, we try to create specialized mechanisms that have more restrictive properties that make them more scaling-friendly, while supporting the heaviest loads incurred by users and applications today (eg. token transfers, swaps) and tomorrow (eg. privacy protocols). The other common theme is treating STARKs and AI-accelerated FV as first-class objects, that we are okay betting the technical future of Ethereum on. There are recursive STARKs in many layers of the protocol, one particular primitive (the "aggregate to union verified dependencies" primitive) is expected to be used in *three* places in the protocol: EL, CL and DL. This can only be safe with formal verification, which is itself only feasible with modern AI tools. In general, many steps forward in maturity. And a huge amount of hard work by many dozens of Ethereum researchers and developers on all of these features. Ethereum will be quantum-safe. Ethereum will put users' privacy first. Ethereum will be secure. Ethereum will be censorship-resistant. Ethereum will be highly performant and scalable while satisfying the above. And Ethereum will be Lean.

Every wallet choice comes with tradeoffs. No one should keep their life savings in the same wallet they use for everyday convenience. The wallet page actually gets the most visits on It feels like one of the places where we can improve guidance.

Minimax H3 is the first *open* video model I've seen that outperforms HunyuanVideo 1.5 - which is actually an impressive accomplishment for @TencentHunyuan to have held that throne for so long. For a while now I've been sad that the image/video frontier seemed to be getting much more closed than the text LLM frontier. H3 is a very strong step back in the open direction. This was generated in ~30 min on my AMD laptop:

Very welcome recent news from Signal: they are working on letting you register an account without a phone number. That said, an important counterpoint about what this would and would not accomplish. The good #1#: reducing dependence on phone numbers. Even aside from privacy benefits, reducing dependency on a highly oligopolistic system of chokepoints is good in itself. The good #2#: phone numbers are for many people not a good "root" of identity from an access control perspective. Phone numbers get sim swapped all the time. The good #3#: allowing phone-number-free accounts will make it harder for them in the future to discriminate against people by country - and so make it harder for governments to pressure them to block their own citizens. Now, on privacy. Significantly better than status quo, so yes it is good #4#, but... In practice, in 2026, I believe that pseudonymity (a long-term persistent account that is not tied to your primary identity) is a dead concept. There are just too many channels by which we accidentally slowly leak data about who we are - timing of messages, the pattern of who we send messages to with what frequency, size, etc. And too many highly effective AI-based means (both using LLMs per-user, and LLMs helping every person and agency under the sun use math that we had all along) to uncover and piece together those hints. As a trivial example, whatever server you interact with learns your IP address, but even if you hide *that* with a VPN or Tor, there are many other identity leakage vectors. And so the only defensible form of privacy is *message-by-message unlinkability* - no one except sender and receiver knows the (sender, receiver) pair, ideally even not knowing who the sender or the receiver are. A natural taxonomy of privacy is the following 2x2: * Sitting duck: adversary knows "X did Y" * Confidentiality: adversary knows "X did ???" [E2E encryption provides this] * Anonymity: adversary knows "??? did Y" [aka message-by-message unlinkability] * Ideal: adversary knows "??? did ???" Signal has already had confidentiality for a long time. (Note: in other contexts, "confidentiality" sometimes means "someone knows X did Y, and we trust that someone to not reveal it", ie. not true privacy. Here, by confidentiality we mean hiding contents from third parties) This adds pseudonymity: in the above schema, adversary knows "0x8b512c... did Y", where they don't initially know who 0x8b512c... is, but may figure that out over time. The ideal is getting to message-by-message unlinkability. Actually accomplishing that gets into territory that is currently being explored by mixnet projects as well as newer messengers, eg. @session_app and @SimpleXChat. Once we get deeper into this territory, I suspect the primary frontier will be spam and DoS protection. Right now, much of the internet blocks all Tor exit nodes - not because they personally hate privacy, but because that's where DoS attacks come from. So we need ways for people to prove their non-spammer status while maintaining message-by-message unlinkability. See here for one direction (which complements nicely). So I hope that we appreciate the victory that is mainstreaming of end-to-end encryption, that we actually get Signal accounts without phone number dependency (it's a great thing even if it had zero privacy consequences), and then that we keep moving forward and pushing the frontier of data leakage minimization.

This is quite a good article on how the cubic formula works, and particularly how root-finding is connected to symmetries (key background for understanding the impossibility of a quintic formula)

A new type of "high-level programming language" that seems really worth trying to make, is a language that gets compiled to Lean (or HOL, or...) that is specifically about making it as friendly as possible for a human to read definitions and theorems. Not the proofs - as all that matters with proofs is that the proofs are correct - just the definitions and theorems. The intended use case is that AI outputs a blob of proofs, and you're trying to make it as easy as possible for anyone reading the output to understand what the actual precise claims are that have been proven

But here we get to the thing that will confound looking at human and machine as separate units: the possibility of deeper and deeper integration between human and machine. This is the strand of technology that includes: computers being able to work much more symbiotically with us, picking up on all kinds of conscious and sub-conscious signals we release as an interface, brain-computer interfaces, computer-assisted telepathy that helps multiple people better understand each other and work together. The ultimate end is erasing the binary divide between human and machine and opening up any position on that spectrum. On one end, you sitting at a laptop terminal; on the other end, mind uploading, and also everything in between. The hope is that deeply integrated human + machine will outperform separated human + machine, and that this will remain the case all the way up to the technological ceiling. This is the best "far-future AI outcome that I actually like" that I can come up with: * We preserve global political and economic pluralism (no single company or government dominates) all the way up to the technological ceiling. * We humans each get the ability to either take technological upgrades to ourselves, and explore the universe at a level competitive with "pure" machines, or stay as we are, and get some ability to act in the world through having a bot listen to our instructions. * Most of Earth will probably become a highly-regulated nature preserve where anyone can continue living the kind of life they have now (without the pains and annoyances; most challenge will be healthy "good challenge"), and if you want to do more crazy things, you go to space. Make no mistake - this is a ride through a narrow corridor. Things could go off the rails in one of several different ways: AI-on-its-own could get too powerful relative to the alternatives; one country or one company could gain decisive advantage and decide to lock it in permanently, powerful technological ways of destroying each other could cause incalculable harm, or the human + machine integration approach itself ends up preserving not enough of our humanity, and so it ends up being "just another way to make powerful bots". For these reasons, I wish that we can ride through the narrow corridor at 60 kph and not 200 kph, which is why I feel warmly toward "slowdown" / "pause" proposals (including "give us a chance to hit the brakes" ideas like mutually assured compute destruction (as in AI 2040, also previously Dan Hendrycks, and others)). My ideal world is actually one where (i) open weights wins, and (ii) Dean Ball turns out to be completely right that open weights is decelerationist because it deters capex in frontier models [though it will enable more capex in peripherals and applications], because then we get slowdown without any of the downsides of doing it through heavier-handed political means. But also I don't think we should count on the world to naturally give us "convenient" laws of economics and physics. We do have some degree of agency over the laws of politics, plenty of ways to change incentives without putting a king in charge, and we should exercise that.

But AGI is not the same as ASI (artificial superintelligence). To see the difference, let us zoom into what things might look like one year before the singularity. We also need to add a third line to the chart: the centaur (human + machine). An analogy here is chess. Machine surpassed the average human in the late 1970s, and surpassed the top human (Kasparov) in 1997. But human + machine continued to beat machine alone all the way until around 2017. What did the twilight of human + machine in chess look like? Actually, it did look like humans being relegated to more and more "high-level strategic thinking" functions, while bots managed the move-by-move. Very similar to vibe coding in 2026. Before we get to a point where there are no areas where our input is economically helpful, we will be in a regime where there are only a few such areas. And because we humans are scarce, those few areas will become the global economy's bottleneck - they will be the only thing you can't optimize down to near-zero cost (and latency), and so all our attention will go toward those tasks.

Thread: how I think about the growth of AI capabilities and what it means for us as they keep getting stronger. I think the right model for comparing humans and AI is not any single dimension like intelligence or aggregate performance on economic tasks. Rather, I view both humans and machines as having a whole range of capabilities. This includes both physical (eg. doing things with our hands, walking) and mental (eg. strategic thinking, mental math, emotional intelligence). For most of human history, machines have only exceeded us in very few areas, eg. a strong early example is water and windmills. So we can look at the situation in 1500 like this:

Vibe-coded a toy demo version of the "anon billboard with moderation" idea from on aztec It's early days but you can already do very interesting nontrivial stuff!

สวนสัตว์เปิดเขาเขียว ฉลองใหญ่ครบรอบ 2 ขวบ “หมูเด้ง” ซุปตาร์ระดับโลก ดันบิ๊กโปรเจกต์ “Hippo Village” งบ 75 ล้าน พลิกโฉมแลนด์มาร์คปี 2570 10 กรกฎาคม 2569 นายบุญชอบ สุทธมนัสวงษ์ ประธานกรรมการองค์การสวนสัตว์แห่งประเทศไทย ให้เกียรติมาเป็นประธานในพิธีเปิดกิจกรรม “Happy เด้ง Day ฉลองวันเกิดหมูเด้ง 2 ขวบ “อย่างเป็นทางการ ณ ส่วนแสดงฮิปโปโปเตมัสสวนสัตว์เปิดเขาเขียวจังหวัดชลบุรี เพื่อร่วมเฉลิมฉลองให้กับ “หมูเด้ง” ฮิปโปโปเตมัสแคระขวัญใจมหาชนชาวไทยและแฟนคลับจากทั่วทุกมุมโลก โดยมี นายณรงวิทย์ ชดช้อย ผู้อำนวยการสวนสัตว์เปิดเขาเขียว กล่าวต้อนรับ พร้อมด้วยนางจงกลนี แก้วสด ผู้อำนวยการองค์การสวนสัตว์แห่งประเทศไทย เป็นผู้กล่าวรายงานวัตถุประสงค์การจัดงาน โดยมีแขกผู้มีเกียรติเข้าร่วมงานอย่างคับคั่ง ในพิธีเปิดไฮไลต์สำคัญ นายบุญชอบ สุทธมนัสวงษ์ พร้อมด้วยคณะผู้บริหารและนักท่องเที่ยว ได้ร่วมกันร้องเพลงแฮปปี้เบิร์ธเดย์ 2 ขวบหมูเด้ง และร่วมกันมอบเค้กวันเกิดให้แก่ “หมูเด้ง” ที่จัดตกแต่งด้วยผักผลไม้นานาชนิดภายในส่วนแสดง ท่ามกลางรอยยิ้มของแฟนคลับและนักท่องเที่ยวที่มารอชมอย่างเนืองแน่น นอกจากนี้ยังมีนิทรรศการและแกลอรี่ภาพหมูเด้ง ขบวนพาเหรดมาสคอตสัตว์เพื่อนหมูเด้งสุดน่ารักมาร่วมสีสัน และยังมีบูธให้แฟนคลับไปเขียนอวยพรวันเกิดให้กับหมูเด้งด้วย นายบุญชอบ สุทธมนัสวงษ์ ประธานกรรมการองค์การสวนสัตว์ฯ เปิดเผยว่า “หมูเด้ง” ได้พิสูจน์ให้เห็นถึงพลังของการเป็น “ซอฟต์พาวเวอร์” (Soft Power) ของประเทศไทยอย่างแท้จริง โดยสามารถสร้างแรงขับเคลื่อนและผลกระทบเชิงบวกในหลากหลายมิติ ทั้งการกระตุ้นเศรษฐกิจและการท่องเที่ยวในพื้นที่จังหวัดชลบุรี รวมถึงสร้างรายได้กลับคืนสู่ภารกิจด้านการอนุรักษ์สัตว์ป่าขององค์การสวนสัตว์แห่งประเทศไทย ในพระบรมราชูปถัมภ์ ได้อย่างมหาศาลและในโอกาสนี้สวนสัตว์เปิดเขาเขียวยังได้เดินหน้าโครงการ “Hippo Village” (หมู่บ้านฮิปโป) ด้วยงบประมาณสนับสนุนจากรัฐบาล 75 ล้านบาท โดยโครงการนี้จะเริ่มก่อสร้างในปี 2570 เพื่อมุ่งยกระดับสวัสดิภาพสัตว์และพัฒนาสวนสัตว์ไทยให้ก้าวสู่มาตรฐานระดับสากลอย่างยั่งยืนต่อไป โดยการก่อสร้าง “Hippo Village” ในครั้งนี้ มีวัตถุประสงค์สำคัญเพื่อปรับปรุงส่วนจัดแสดงและพื้นที่เพาะเลี้ยงฮิปโปโปเตมัสแคระและฮิปโปโปเตมัสให้มีความเหมาะสมมากขึ้นภายใต้แนวคิดการออกแบบ Nature-Based Design ที่จำลองสิ่งแวดล้อมให้ใกล้เคียงกับธรรมชาติมากที่สุด ซึ่งจะช่วยส่งเสริมสวัสดิภาพสัตว์ (Animal Welfare) ให้ดียิ่งขึ้น เอื้อต่อการแสดงพฤติกรรมตามธรรมชาติอย่างอิสระ และมีระบบจัดการสิ่งแวดล้อมที่ยั่งยืน นอกจากจะเป็นการมอบบ้านหลังใหม่ที่ดีขึ้นให้แก่หมูเด้งและเพื่อนๆ แล้ว โครงการนี้ยังเป็นอีกหนึ่งแลนด์มาร์คสำคัญที่จะช่วยรองรับนักท่องเที่ยวได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ ปลอดภัย และช่วยกระตุ้นเศรษฐกิจการท่องเที่ยวของไทยในระยะยาวอย่างยั่งยืนอีกด้วย #moodeng# #สวนสัตว์เปิดเขาเขียว# #หมูเด้ง# #แฮปปี้เด้งเดย์#

One thing I find striking in the discourse between AI 2040 and its detractors is that the two seem to be locked in to totally incompatible worldviews of how fast and how much of a big deal AI progress is: * In AI 2040, every scenario sees superintelligence of some kind emerging by 2040, unless a herculean effort is made to completely stop it * Detractors say things like "AI 2040 is naive about human coordination ability and a threat to freedom", but don't seem to see any naivety in assuming that the ASI transition will just go well by default, don't seem to see ASI itself as a massive power concentrator risk, and don't seem to feel fear of humanity's "hard power" dropping to zero if ASIs can do literally every task better than we can. This stance makes total sense in a "AI is normal technology" world, zero sense in a world where superintelligence is possible by 2030 and almost guaranteed by 2040 I think my beliefs are: - If I was confident that (present-day-style) AI is normal technology, I would be in the detractor camp - If I was confident that superintelligence is coming in 2030 by default, I would be closer to the AI 2040 camp - it's naive, but every other option is naive squared? But my problem is that I feel great uncertainty and have no idea which of the two worlds (or some other third thing) we're living in? Hence why I continue to be open-minded about slowdowns/pauses, but also I feel very uncomfortable with the "open source bad, the good outcome is the one where our guys have controlling global dominance" push coming from some major AI companies and intellectuals - in a "normal" world that's the sort of thing that triggers every political alarm bell at the same time. A big reason why I have been advocating and trying my best to support the d/acc platform (rapid up-skilling in formal verification, cryptography, secure and open hardware, pandemic resistance and other defensive biotech, food and basic resource security, public epistemics, non-power-concentrating versions of physical security) is that these things are clearly worth doing in both worlds. The 2040 plan is already much more open source friendly (even mandating it! yay). It also includes "mutually assured compute destruction" ideas which (if they work) effectively give one of 2-5 actors the ability to trigger a global compute winter - as opposed to giving 1-5 actors the ability to selectively disenfranchise people they consider baddies while exempting themselves. This is also a big improvement. So I can see the earnest attempts to improve along the dimensions detractors criticize on ("does this concentrate power in big AI labs and superpower governments?"), and I appreciate this. I think many people don't appreciate enough the differences between different "kinds" of pause buttons, and how some concentrate power far more than others. Probably we can think harder and improve even more here. But on the "slowdown/pause or not" topic, there isn't a magic "escape the tradeoff" button. The Hansonian in me says: the winning deal is a deal which, from the perspective of both sides' present-day beliefs and knowledge, both sides would accept, though for different reasons. If the crux is AI progress speed, then identify a set of pre-agreed triggers for "okay, serious shit is happening" [super-pandemics? >25% unemployment? something involving slaughterbots?], and pre-agree that we become much more open-minded to the slowdown or pause thing if enough triggers come to pass within some timeframe. 2040 detractors (who clearly implicitly think that we'll see amazing speedup of progress from AI but think that what I call the "serious shit" category is overhyped) will accept expecting that the triggers don't come to pass, and AI worriers will accept expecting that they will. Pre-agreeing on the specific triggers means that once the triggers either hit or don't hit, there is stronger legitimacy around the idea that one side's worldview turned out more correct and we should be more inclined toward their program. If I were @elonmusk (or zuck, or...) I would re-tool twitter much more heavily into being a platform for helping to identify and make these kinds of grand win-win deals, so that we can bypass big-country governments and big-company CEOs and big nonprofit intellectuals and give more people a voice in the discussion. It's possibly one of the best things that social media _could_ do for humanity if it wanted to. But again, maybe this is also naive. Actually, probably it's naive. But currently, I see zero plans for how to deal with an ASI transition that are not naive. Perhaps humanity is stuck with a choice between naive and naive squared (or maybe even naive squared and naive cubed), so I feel inclined to cut some slack to people who are trying.