Daniil and David Liberman previously sold their first company to Snapchat. Now, they are racing to build a decentralized alternative to challenge OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google before the window of opportunity closes. In this interview, they explain why centralized AI will ultimately lead to a "polarized" world where a tiny elite holds access and everyone else becomes "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:
Peter: Good morning, both of you.
Both: Good morning.
Peter: I'm really looking forward to this conversation. We've been preparing for a while. I've been thinking a lot about AI and using it extensively, 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 the infrastructure—electricity, the grid, the internet, money—when we can't survive 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 everyone on Earth, it will only expand freedom. If not, the opposite will happen.
Daniil: This isn't even servitude—we wouldn't even realize we were in servitude. It's like the state in *1984*. If the AI infrastructure is controlled by a handful of companies or governments, we will see a terrible situation.
The word "propaganda"? Forget it. It won't even be seen—it exists in every answer. We already use this system as our therapist, news source, calculation tool, everything. Our trust in it will only increase. The fewer mistakes it makes, the higher the trust will be, eventually reaching 100% trust. Therefore, once someone with malicious intent—anyone wanting to manipulate your opinion or freedom of thought—targets a specific issue, that's it. You're completely in their grasp.
Peter: But if it permeates everything, can people still opt out? For example, someone says, "I don't want to live in a world that constantly listens to AI and talks to AI." Just like we see with mobile phones, people are starting to rebel. They want to return to the real world, connect with nature, eat good food—can people still 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 at the same time—whether your productivity can match those using AI. That's a problem. For a very few, maybe, but for most of us—the answer is no.
Peter: Do you think a currency that lives entirely outside of AI could emerge?
David: Honestly, that's interesting. If it goes to an extreme—say, one company controls all AI, a complete monopoly—capable of replacing all human labor: software engineers, designers, management, marketing... then the question becomes: Will we all be unemployed?
The answer could be "no"—if we continue trading among ourselves without relying on that company. Even if that company is ten times more efficient, we can still function among ourselves, just like today. Nothing changes—unless it's used to control our decisions. If we can still exit, we can operate normally in our own market, while the other market might be ten times larger in size.
David: So the core problem is the same as everything before—the fight between Federalists and Anti-Federalists when Americans pushed the British out of America and drafted the Constitution. It's the struggle between decentralization and centralization. We saw the same thing in currency: governments print money, and Bitcoin emerged.
AI will face the same centralization problem—not "will face," but "is facing." Just like Bitcoin's trajectory, initially only a few people realized this, and their words even sounded extremist. They said, "We need to be vigilant, need to build alternatives." But then, one event after another, more and more people were converted—just like every financial crisis, every time the Fed prints money, convinces more people that an alternative is needed.
We expect the same to happen with AI decentralization. Take the recent OpenClaw incident—a very popular open-source AI agent used by thousands of people to call Anthropic's Claude model. They were excited to use this model. But Anthropic directly cut off access for OpenClaw users. The entire community made a huge effort to switch to other models.
This shows that access to AI is already proving—we shouldn't take it for granted, can't expect these models to always be open to us as they are now. And once you realize this, you see how you're becoming increasingly dependent on it in your work—whether you're an engineer, business owner, or journalist. Every time people feel their freedom is threatened, we expect more and more people will look for alternatives.
Peter: I think we need to be very careful with the word "servitude." It carries heavy weight. But let me tell a little story. Recently, I've been trying to wean myself off my phone because someone explained to me that a phone is like a parasite. I notice that everywhere in life, people are staring at their phones—walking on 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: booking flights, paying parking fees, banking transactions, 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, helping me prepare materials and get work done. I'm wondering: At what point does AI transform from a tool for me into me becoming its slave?
David: Being cautious with that word, I agree. From what we observe around us—in the startup circle, those worth hundreds of millions or billions—because of AI, they've started working more. They simply can't stop because it's addictive in a certain sense: you say it, and it happens. You type your command, things start happening—software gets built, marketing plans are prepared, emails are written, GitHub commits are done for you. In a way, there's so much you can do that it's the opposite of servitude—you're the slave master.
Peter: Interesting. I discussed this with someone the other day. I said I feel like I'm experiencing AI fatigue.
David: Exactly. On one hand, it makes me more productive, able to do more. Actually, I end up working more. On the other hand, keeping up with the pace of AI development and change is almost impossible. So I start to wonder—do I really want to go down this path? Do I want to be this kind of person? It's really exhausting.
Daniil: The only way to keep up with AI 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 model has been upgraded two versions, some new tools have appeared, something has replaced something else. Honestly, the answer is likely: You won't be that far behind. It'll just take a little time to adapt to the new toolset, then you move on.
I think we're all too excited right now because magic is happening right before our eyes. At the same time, we're addicted, accompanied by anxiety—the fear of missing out on the latest tools while your friends, peers, competitors, even your girlfriend, know more about AI developments than you do. This is a real problem now.
But this anxiety itself creates dependence, and dependence is already very close to servitude. Because if your livelihood, your ability to remain productive in society, depends on these tools, you have no way to stop using them.
Peter: If we think about how the internet aggregated—we have Amazon, which is a great tool but a disaster for physical bookstores, everything concentrated in Bezos's hands. Uber, Uber Eats, Deliveroo created the gig economy where workers at the bottom barely scrape by, upward mobility is extremely difficult. But opening a physical bookstore, you can work hard, expand slowly, open a second, a third. We concentrated everything around tech, making upward mobility very difficult while creating a huge number of super-rich at the top.
Now, with AI, my thought is—I listen to the All-In podcast, hear Sacks and Chamath talk about AI's power, hear Andreessen talk about AI's power. But I notice—this idea came from an Eric Weinstein tweet—these large language models are absorbing all human innovation throughout history and concentrating the benefits into the hands of a few. If AI starts taking away jobs, these people have no skin in the game regarding AI's downside risks. At what point will AI start distributing work like the gig economy, and we functionally become slaves to this system?
Daniil: This is the scariest part, and this is how we see it—there are only two scenarios. One is exactly what you described: we all lose our jobs. A specific company, or five oligopolistic companies producing essentially the same product, vertically integrates everything—from top-level intelligence to toilet paper at the bottom, all within one ecosystem—the Apple ecosystem, the OpenAI ecosystem, the 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, flesh-and-blood laborers, until robots take that job too.
Daniil: Exactly. That's one world. But there's 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 another tool—a new productivity tool. Everyone can be super efficient, reaching whatever level of productivity they want. We continue to operate in the same market and economy until we reach a state of complete abundance—where the robots and intelligence I own can produce everything I need in life, the only thing beyond is my relationships with others.
Before complete abundance arrives, we can move forward with equal access to this tool—the more equal the access, the less turmoil we will see. It's all about access.
Peter: I'm thinking, not enough people view this as a problem that needs solving. The All-In podcast hosts have no incentive to think about this because they are Silicon Valley investors benefiting from centralization. In a way, centralization has won over the past one or two hundred years. The Federalists won, the Anti-Federalists lost. But the Anti-Federalists were right. Look at what happened to currency—it got centralized. Bitcoin tells a compelling story, but watching everything increase in price, people eroded by inflation, they still don't buy Bitcoin.
So in the world of AI, with these amazing tools, these large language models that feel like magic to us—how do we get people to start thinking: There must be an alternative, a decentralized version?
Daniil: There's currently a situation where people are getting more and more afraid of where things are headed, and that's important. I really hate that real human history has been driven by fear. That's why I want to present a positive picture, so we all actually fight for that better future. But the fear is real, the problem is real, and we feel it more and more now. In the next two years, we'll feel it even more intensely, and it will happen very fast.
For example, now you see new layoffs almost every week, ten thousand people here, ten thousand there. People should stop and think: If these tools truly improve productivity, why are there still layoffs? Instead, you should be able to do more, accelerate the economy, so why lay people off?
Peter: You need different types of talent.
David: Even so, hiring should be more than layoffs, but we don't see that.
These centralized companies, when they started—like Amazon—brought genuinely good ideas: products delivered to your door with one click, in 15 minutes. We all bought in, we all wanted that world. Then they changed the policies. Amazon was originally a network platform, just selling products. But they looked at your purchase data, then marketed their own branded products to you, lower quality, ultimately more expensive than the original products—because once 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're not saying 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 they have to keep promises made early on.
Peter: Do you think they are brainwashing us? Because for them, there's a huge benefit.
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 really taking risks but just making money for others or themselves. It's a chain of making money for others. There's nothing wrong with profit if it doesn't form a monopoly; but once you monopolize an area, it leads to declining service quality, predatory price increases—Netflix is the best example. Prices keep going up, but content keeps getting worse. They have more users, the cost of digital products should be spread across more users, so prices should be lower, but we don't see that.
Peter: Michael Green talked about monopoly being one of the biggest problems in the economy. Without competition, you get worse and more expensive products.
About a month ago, Lex Fridman did a podcast with Dario. Lex asked him whether the business model of charging per token via API would persist. Dario first said it 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 concerns your health, you are willing to pay more.
From the perspective of electricity, we want AI to be as universal and cheap as electricity. But what he meant is: the kilowatt-hour that lights your home and the one during your open-heart surgery should naturally have different prices—you'd be willing to pay more for the latter.
David: That's the scenario where we become slaves to the system—we are no longer humans, but appendages to the AI system. This is the difference: when access is not guaranteed by a protocol open to everyone, 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 at higher prices.
These companies are in a tough spot themselves—they are all in a race to achieve superintelligence. The cost of running these large language models is enormous, but revenue hasn't caught up. They have no reason to care about the impact on ordinary people like us.
Daniil: They won't care. That's the simple conclusion.
Since 2014, we've been part of a group discussing the potential bad scenarios of AI. There were many different views back then—Terminator-style scenarios, doomsday scenarios... But our judgment has always been: the worst scenarios all start with AI being controlled by a few companies. When you follow those scenarios step by step, you realize—even if those founders have good intentions, truly want a better future—the way they build it will inevitably lead us to a bad outcome.
Peter: We live in a financial system where we need money to survive, but the system keeps extracting upwards—governments always overspend, banks create money out of thin air, creating an inflationary environment, asset inflation but wages lagging. On social media, you see increasing criticism of billionaires and big corporations, people leaning towards some form of new communism. This tendency is understandable—it's not like a normal recession where the economy comes back; the economy is booming, people are making billions, the bottom is getting poorer, and those lost jobs are never coming back.
Daniil: So it's not just AI posing this threat; we need to rethink the entire system so people can survive and thrive. But unconditional Universal Basic Income (UBI
