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Chapter 1: What does the leap from 12% to 70% in exploit detection mean for crypto?
Bankless Nation, we are here with Alpen Uxololu. He is an investment and a research partner at Paradigm. Also the co-author of a paper titled EVM Bench, an open benchmark for smart contract security agents written in collaboration with OpenAI to measure the ability of AI agents to just detect or patch or exploit smart contract vulnerabilities.
We're going to talk about the way that AI and AI capabilities are going to impact our crypto ecosystem, our smart contracts. Alpen, welcome to Bankless. Hi, thanks for having me. I want to start off this podcast with a very big question.
Chapter 2: How does AI's ability to find exploits impact smart contract security?
How at risk are we from AI? How large of a threat does AI smart contract capabilities pose to our industry?
Yeah, I mean, in the long term, it's now increasingly clear that AI is going to be extremely, extremely good for crypto, especially on the security front, because... We're going to get to a world where because everything is much more secure, the ceiling on the industry is much higher.
So our partner, Matt, talks about how if you have a grocery store that's run by mom and pop, because they can't see everything in the store, there's a limit to how big they can get. But the moment you add security cameras in, so security has this effect of increasing the capacity, the carrying capacity of an industry.
I think in the short term, it's up to us because the models are getting extremely good, like strikingly good. When we started working on EVM Bench, which is a benchmark that consists entirely of fund draining critical bugs around six months ago, the models were able to find less than 20% of the bugs, like around 12 to 13%.
And just over the course of while we were working on the benchmark, this number went up to over 50%. And in between when I drafted the launch tweet and when I had to actually hit send with the release of 5.3 Codex, it jumped up to over 70%. So these things are just growing at a blistering pace.
And it's very important that we position the industry in a way that we can defensively protect against attacks. But in the long term, I think it massively increases the carrying capacity of crypto.
Yeah, I think what you're saying is in the long term, we get something approaching perfect security. Yeah. Right now, we do not have perfect security.
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Chapter 3: What exactly is EVMBench and how does it work?
Let me ask you the same question, but a little bit differently. Say only bad actors, only black actors have access to AI capabilities. In that context, how at risk is our industry? Like how exploitable are our smart contracts given the increase in AI capabilities?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really hard to say when we approach super intelligence levels. I do think until we hit the like right now, the models are quite good, but they're not better than the best human auditors.
So we already have existed in crypto under this threat model of extremely intelligent adversarial actors that are constantly trying to break all of our software that with all the money in it. So in that sense, like crypto is already quite hardened. But it's just really hard to know when we talk about sort of a technology inflecting into superintelligence.
This is very similar to how encoding capabilities were increasing mostly linearly over the last several years.
Chapter 4: Why has AI not prioritized crypto data until now?
And in December last year, they crossed some threshold where they were better than sort of the median engineer. And a lot of stuff clicked for everyone and it started becoming this aha moment and this sort of oh crap moment.
And I think something very similar will probably happen with security where right now it's like increasing pretty rapidly at still at a linear clip, but it's not as good as the best human auditors yet. So we don't feel it yet. It hasn't actually broken any of our assumptions.
But once we hit in maybe six to eight months, I'm pretty confident at this point by the end of the year, a super human AI auditor will This will just completely break all of our assumptions and we'll need to go back and make sure that we're hardening all of the contracts that are housing the what, nearly $100 billion of assets in crypto.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of a blackhat vs whitehat AI arms race?
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Chapter 6: How do EVM and Solana compare in terms of network effects?
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Chapter 7: What role does AI play in the future of formal verification?
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Chapter 8: Why does the guest believe in the potential of crypto despite its challenges?
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Elpin, if we zoom out here, though, and we think about AI intelligence and its security capabilities and its bug detection capabilities kind of going exponential, and we think about a super intelligent AI, I don't even know how to think about security in general because it can envision scenarios beyond human comprehension.
For instance, what if it thinks up a way to crack some of our cryptography with some math that we didn't even know existed? I heard actually Justin Drake on a podcast recently talk about this. It's not just the threat of quantum computers, which is kind of a real known threat. And some of our encryption algorithms are under threat due to quantum computers.
But if we have a super intelligent AI, I mean, who knows what it could have the ability to actually hack and decrypt. I mean, I guess my question is when it comes to super intelligent AI, is security just like not even a thing we can prepare for? I mean, how do we even think about it?
I mean, I think security. So the way I would think about it is that I think Right now, this frontier is very illegible. And if you try to do this in the limit thinking, you end up leading to very odd places that may be very psychosis-inducing. I think one of the skills... I think the capacity to face the singularity and stay sane is a very important skill to develop. And I think this is...
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