Patrick Collison: evaluation

Transcript context

…I promise not to be too myopic about AI, but one more question. Long-term, we can't forecast. Maybe even medium-term, we can't. But near-term, it looks like we might have things that look like AI agents, and they might need to trade. What does the financial infrastructure for AI agents look like? That's a really interesting question. Automated or autonomous transactions already exist to some extent today. Lots of services have usage-based billing, right? A lot of the expenses being incurred are autonomously incurred. No human is pushing a button when Stripe does most of what it does with cloud computing and incurs some cost with some cloud service. In an extremely primitive way it's happening today. I assume it will follow some gradient, where some of those decisions will be made by an LLM or LLM equivalent. There'll be an almost unnoticeably smooth continuum up to very considerable degrees of autonomy. It's not that we're going to wake up some month and be like: "Oh my god, suddenly the bots have been unleashed." This will now sound very parochial and maybe I'm getting excessively tactical, but there'll be very interesting questions around the legality of bots in terms of: are they treated as the responsibility of the owner? Is there any degree of independence granted? How does liability work? Which rails are best suited? What kind of transaction velocities are we talking about here? Because if it's a billion transactions a second, then the properties of that system should look very different to one giant tiering transaction every day. If we just use the analogy of the usage-based services, those tend to incur liabilities in tiny increments, but then to settle on a monthly basis when you pay your bill. So maybe these agent transactions will have that character. There are a lot of practical applied questions, but I think what you're saying around these autonomous transactions conceivably being an important dimension, is very true and real and is one of the interesting ways in which the economy might change and expand over the next decade. It's possible that the crypto plays some role here. We take KYC and AML very seriously for humans: we want to know the human that is associated with some particular financial activity. Obviously, that's a murkier question in the context of some AI agent. If we, in some blurry sense, look at crypto as the part of financial services that is de facto exempt from AML by design, then maybe that plays a role. How long before Stripe was founded do you think a product like Stripe could have been invented?…

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