The Fate of AI and the Mirror of History: How Long Until Humanity Steps Aside | Peter McCormack Interviews the Liberman Brothers

Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdDNw-VxCvA

Daniil and David Liberman previously sold their first company to Snapchat. Now, they are racing against time before the window closes to build a decentralized alternative to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. In this interview, they explain why centralized AI will ultimately lead to a "polarized" world: a tiny elite holds all the access, while everyone else is reduced to "moving parts" in the system — and why they believe the next 24 months will determine which path we take.

This interview delves into the following topics:

• The Fate of AI: Why is AI repeating the script of centralized internet?
• The Recursive Loop: AI is writing AI, and the gears of evolution have spun out of control.
• The Failing "Kill Switch": Why will attempts to shut down AI inevitably fail?
• Future Ownership: How did a few American giants end up "buying out" humanity's future?
• A Mirror of History: How is what they saw in Russia in 2008 being replayed in the current AI wave?
• The Only Blueprint: Why is Bitcoin the only paradigm in history that has successfully defeated centralization?
• The Darkest Scenario: The ultimate projection they are almost unwilling to speak out loud.

AI and Human Freedom

Peter: Good morning, both of you.

Both: Good morning.

Peter: I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a while. I've been thinking a lot about AI, and using it a lot, trying to understand what it means for the future of the planet we live on, especially the world my children will grow up in. If AI becomes the infrastructure for everything, or part of it—power, the grid, the internet, money—when we can't live without it, where does human freedom go?

Daniil: The answer to that question really depends on how we build this infrastructure. If this infrastructure is equally accessible to every person on Earth, it will only expand freedom. If not, the opposite is true.

Invisible Enslavement

Daniil: It's not even enslavement—we wouldn't even realize we are in it. It's like a 1984 state of being. If AI infrastructure is controlled by a handful of corporations or governments, we will see a very bad situation.

Forget the word "propaganda"? You won't even see it—it exists in every answer. We’re already using this system as our therapist, news source, calculation tool, everything. Our trust in it will continue to increase; the fewer mistakes it makes, the higher the trust, eventually reaching 100%. So, once someone with ill intentions—anyone wanting to manipulate your opinions or freedom of thought—targets any specific issue, it's game over. They have you completely.

Peter: But if it permeates everything, is there a possibility for people to opt out? Like someone saying, I don't want to live in a world constantly taking orders from and talking to AI. It's like the phenomenon we see with phones—people start to push back, want to return to the real world, connect with nature, eat good food—can people live outside the AI system in this world?

David: That's a good question. You can survive, but the question is whether you can remain competitive in the market—whether your productivity can match those using AI. That is a problem. Maybe for a very small minority, but for most of us—the answer is no.

Peter: Do you think there might be a currency that exists completely outside of AI?

David: Honestly, that's interesting. If you take it to the extreme—say, one company controls all AI, complete monopoly—capable of replacing all human labor: software engineers, designers, management, marketing... then the question becomes: will we all become unemployed because of it?

The answer could be "no"—if we continue to transact with each other, without relying on that company. Even if that company is ten times more efficient, we can still operate among ourselves, just like today, nothing would change—unless it is used to control our decisions. If we can still exit, we can function normally in our original market, it's just that the other market might be ten times its current size.

Bitcoin and AI Centralization

David: So the core problem is the same as always—when the Americans drove the British out of America and drafted the Constitution, the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists was a struggle between decentralization and centralization. We saw the same thing with money: governments print money, and Bitcoin was born.

AI will face the same centralization problem—not "will face," but "is facing." Like the trajectory of Bitcoin, initially only a few people realized this, and what they said even sounded extremist. They'd say, we need to be vigilant, we need to build alternatives. But then, event after event, more people are converted—just like every financial crisis, every time the Fed prints money, more people believe an alternative is needed.

We expect the same to happen regarding the decentralization of AI. Take the recent OpenClaw incident—a very popular open-source AI agent used by thousands to call Anthropic's Claude model. They were excited to use it. But Anthropic simply cut off access for OpenClaw users. The community put in tremendous effort to switch to other models.

This shows that the right to access AI is already proving—we shouldn't take it for granted, shouldn't expect these models to always be open to us as they are now. Once you realize this, you see that you are making yourself increasingly dependent on them in your own work—whether you are an engineer, business owner, or journalist. Every time people feel their freedom is threatened, we expect more and more people to look for alternatives.

Peter: I think the word "enslavement" should be used very cautiously; it carries a heavy connotation. But let me tell you a short story. Lately, I've been trying to quit my phone, because someone explained to me that a phone is like a parasite. I notice everywhere in life, people staring at their phones—walking down the street, on the bus, on the subway, completely glued to them. So one day I deleted 130, 150 apps, and since then I delete one every day. I want to turn my phone into a pure tool: book flights, pay for parking, do banking, but no entertainment apps. I want to quit it.

But at the same time, I'm diving deeper and deeper into AI. I'm building AI infrastructure for my company, using it to prepare materials, get work done. I'm wondering, at what point does AI go from being a tool for me to me becoming its slave?

David: I agree, be cautious with that word. From observing those around us—billionaires, centi-millionaires in the startup world—they are working more because of AI. They simply can't stop, because it's addictive in a certain sense: you say something, and it happens. You type your command, and things start running—software gets built, marketing plans get prepared, emails get written, GitHub commits get done for you. In a sense, you can do so much, it's the complete opposite of slavery—you are the slave master.

Peter: Interesting. I was discussing this with someone the other day, saying I feel like I'm experiencing AI fatigue.

The Beginning of AI Addiction

David: Exactly. On one hand, it makes me more productive, able to do more, so actually I work more. On the other hand, it's almost impossible to keep up with the pace of AI development and change. So I start to think—do I really want to go down this path? Do I want to be this kind of person? It's really tiring.

Daniil: The only way to keep up with AI right now is to be unemployed—literally, it has to be your full-time job. But at the same time, is it really necessary? If you skip a few months and come back, the models have upgraded by two versions, some new tools have appeared, one thing has been replaced by another. Honestly, the answer is probably: you won't be far behind at all. It just takes a bit of time to adapt to the new toolset and then continue.

I think we are all overly excited right now because the magic is happening right before our eyes. At the same time, we are addicted, accompanied by anxiety—the fear of missing out on the latest tool, while your friends, peers, competitors, and even your girlfriend, are more up-to-date on AI trends than you are. This is a real problem right now.

But this anxiety itself creates dependency, and dependency is already very close to enslavement. Because if your livelihood, your ability to be productive in society, depends on these tools, then you simply have no way to stop using them.

Peter: If we think about how the internet has aggregated—we have Amazon, a great tool as a user, but a disaster for physical bookstores, everything concentrated in Bezos' hands. Uber, Uber Eats, Deliveroo created the gig economy, where low-level workers barely scrape by, with extremely limited upward mobility. But opening a physical bookstore, you could work hard, slowly expand, open a second, a third. We've concentrated everything around technology, making upward mobility very difficult, while creating a massive number of super-wealthy at the top.

Now, my thought on AI is—I listen to the All-In podcast, listen to Sacks and Chamath talk about the power of AI, listen to Andreessen talk about the power of AI. But I noticed—this idea came from an Eric Weinstein tweet—these large language models are absorbing all the innovation in human history and concentrating those benefits in the hands of a few. If AI starts taking jobs, these people have no skin in the game regarding AI's downside risks. At what point does AI start distributing work like the gig economy, and we become functionally enslaved to this system?

The End of the Ladder

Daniil: That's the scariest part, and this is how we see it—there are only two scenarios. One is exactly what you described: we all become unemployed. A specific company, or five oligarchic companies essentially producing the same thing, vertically integrates everything—from the top-level intelligence down to the bottom-level toilet paper, all concentrated in one ecosystem—Apple ecosystem, OpenAI ecosystem, Google ecosystem... all the same, vertically integrated from top to bottom. In this world, we all lose our jobs, we are all just parts.

David: Like ants—moving things from here to there, physical laborers, until robots take that job too.

Daniil: Exactly. That's one world. But there is another world—the good one—where everyone has their own robot, everyone has equal access to superintelligence. If it's equally distributed, then everyone just has one more tool—a brand new productivity tool. Everyone can be super efficient, reaching their desired level of productivity, and we continue operating in the same market and economy until we reach a state of complete abundance—the robots and intelligence I own can produce everything I need in life, the only thing beyond that scope is relationships with others.

Before we reach complete abundance, we can move forward with equal access to this tool—the more equal the access, the less turmoil we will see. It all comes down to access.

Peter: I think there aren't enough people who see this as a problem that needs solving. The hosts of the All-In podcast have no incentive to think about it, because they are Silicon Valley investors who benefit from centralization. In a way, centralization has won for the past one or two hundred years. The Federalists won, the Anti-Federalists lost. But the Anti-Federalists were right, because look at what happened to money—it got centralized. Bitcoin tells such a compelling story, but watching everything go up in price, people getting eroded by inflation, they still don't come to buy Bitcoin.

So in the world of AI, with these amazing tools, these magical LLMs for us—how do we get people to start thinking: there must be an alternative, a decentralized version?

The Good AI Future

Daniil: There is definitely a situation now—people are increasingly scared, scared of where things are headed, and that's important. I really hate that real development in human history is driven by fear. That's why I want to present the positive picture, so we all truly strive for that better future. But the fear is real, the problems are real. We feel it more and more now, and in the next two years we will feel it even more intensely, very quickly.

For example, right now, you see new layoff announcements almost every week, ten thousand here, ten thousand there. People should stop and think: if these tools really increase productivity, why are they laying people off? Instead, it should be possible to do more, accelerate the economy, so why the layoffs?

Peter: You need different types of talent.

David: Even so, hiring should outpace layoffs, but we don't see that.

These centralized companies, when they started—like Amazon—brought truly good ideas: goods delivered to your doorstep with one click, in 15 minutes. We all bought into it, we all wanted that world. Then they changed the policies. Amazon was originally a network platform, just selling goods. But they looked at your purchase data, then pushed their own private label to you, lower quality, eventually more expensive than the original goods—because when they control the platform, they can manipulate it.

Google too. I remember around 2003 or 2004, Google promised ads would never appear in the main feed, only on the side of search results. And they promised "Don't Be Evil," but later they said, "we don't mention that anymore."

So the problem is: when we have decentralized protocols, the rules are coded in and never change. This creates certainty, we can all trust the protocol, can fully commit. But those centralized organizations don't believe promises made early on must be continuously kept.

Peter: Do you think they are brainwashing us? Because for them, there are huge benefits.

Daniil: Interesting, "they" who? That's the biggest question. Is it individuals like Sam, Dario? Or companies like Google, Microsoft—thousands of people making decisions for their own benefit, getting bonuses, and above them a layer of investors, shareholders, mainly faceless funds, where no one is truly taking risks, just making money for others or themselves. It's a chain of making money for others. There's nothing wrong with profit itself, as long as there's no monopoly; but once you monopolize a field, it leads to declining service quality and predatory price increases—Netflix is the best example, prices keep going up, content keeps getting worse. They have more users, the cost of digital products should be spread across more users, prices should be lower, but we don't see that.

Why Monopolists Always Win

Peter: Michael Green talked about monopoly being one of the economy's biggest problems. No competition leads to increasingly worse and more expensive products.

About a month ago, Lex Fridman did a podcast with Dario. Lex asked him if the business model of charging users per token via API would continue. Dario first said this model might continue, but then pivoted—he said not all AI tokens have the same value. He gave an example: when AI helps you fix your MacBook, you might be willing to pay less, but when AI relates to your health, you are willing to pay more.

From the perspective of electricity, we want AI to be universal and cheap like electricity. But his point was: the kilowatt-hour lighting your home and the kilowatt-hour used during your open-heart surgery naturally have different prices; you are willing to pay more for the latter.

David: This is the scenario where we become slaves to the system—we are no longer people, but appendages of the AI system. That's the difference: when access isn't guaranteed by a protocol and open to all, we inevitably head towards that future. Unfortunately, industry leaders are not even hiding it anymore; they openly express these ideas because they are preparing for IPOs, showing investors that AI tokens can be sold for higher prices.

These companies are also struggling themselves—they are all in a race to achieve superintelligence, the cost of running these LLMs is huge, but revenues haven't caught up. They have no reason to care about the impact on ordinary people like us.

Daniil: They won't care; it's a simple conclusion.

Since 2014, we've been part of the group discussing the potential bad scenarios of AI. Back then, there were many different views—Terminator-like scenarios, doomsday scenarios... but our assessment has always been: the worst scenarios all start with AI being controlled by a handful of companies. When you extrapolate those scenarios step by step, you realize—even if those founders really have good intentions, really want a better future—the way they build it will ultimately lead us to a bad outcome.

Inflation, AI, and Collapse

Peter: We live in a financial system where we need money to survive, but the system keeps extracting upward—governments always overspend, banks create money from thin air, creating an inflationary environment, asset inflation but wages can't keep up. On social media, you see increasing criticism of billionaires and big corporations, people starting to lean towards some new form of communism. This tendency is understandable—it's not like a normal recession where the economy recovers; instead, the economy is booming, some are making billions, the bottom is getting poorer, and those lost jobs are never coming