Vitalik Buterin says AI prediction markets can make X community notes faster

At the Korea Blockchain Week 2024, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his belief that artificial intelligence and prediction market technology can speed up the production of community notes on the social media platform X. 

Community notes are a feature on X that enables the community to add context to potentially misleading posts. Contributors can leave “notes” on posts, and if there are enough contributors who rate the note as helpful, it will be publicly shown below a post.

Example of community notes. Source: X

While these notes are helpful, Buterin said that the biggest criticism of community notes is that they “don’t appear fast enough.” This suggests that inaccurate posts might have misled some people before the notes appeared. 

Prediction markets can make other mechanisms faster

Buterin added that whatever delay is needed to provide context on posts through community notes is “too much.” However, the Ethereum co-founder argued that the solution might be found in prediction markets. 

Vitalik Buterin speaks with the Korea Blockchain Week audience through a video call. Source: Cointelegraph

Prediction markets are open markets that allow users to bet on specific outcomes. One of the examples Buterin gave is the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket , where people bet on highly debated topics like politics, sports and crypto. Buterin said: 

“One way to think about prediction markets is as a building block that can make other mechanisms faster. [...] You take some existing mechanism, and then you make something much faster that gets incentivized to do as good a job as possible.” 

He said that whenever a post is made, there could be a question to determine whether it warrants a community note. Buterin said that people could use large AI language models (LLMs) and bots to bet small funds on this prediction market. 

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Buterin believes that this can potentially speed up the process of getting to the truth and incentivize the mechanism for the participants. 

“This mechanism will put the note at the end, and then it would reward people who predicted the result correctly, right? So over here, you basically have a vector with low cost but fast,” he explained. 

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