Unlike traditional clouds, the Internet Computer protocol is designed to make applications inherently secure and resilient, eliminating the need for typical cybersecurity measures like firewalls or anti-malware software.
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Crypto's primary advantage is its ability to automate processes that rely on expensive human-based trust (brokers, lawyers) with software and cryptography, which offer mathematical guarantees at a fraction of the cost.
The same AI technology amplifying cyber threats can also generate highly secure, formally verified code. This presents a historic opportunity for a society-wide effort to replace vulnerable legacy software in critical infrastructure, leading to a durable reduction in cyber risk. The main challenge is creating the motivation for this massive undertaking.
Dominic Williams' vision is that users will simply describe their desired app to an AI, which then builds and deploys it on the Internet Computer, handling all underlying complexity and ensuring security.
Vercel is building infrastructure based on a threat model where developers cannot be trusted to handle security correctly. By extracting critical functions like authentication and data access from the application code, the platform can enforce security regardless of the quality or origin (human or AI) of the app's code.
Instead of relying on massive, anonymous replication, the Internet Computer strategically combines known node providers from diverse data centers, geographies, and jurisdictions for robust security with less overhead.
Formal verification, the process of mathematically proving software correctness, has been too complex for widespread use. New AI models can now automate this, allowing developers to build systems with mathematical guarantees against certain bugs—a huge step for creating trust in high-stakes financial software.
The paradigm shift with crypto is not about trusting a new entity like a developer. Instead, it eliminates the need for interpersonal trust by allowing anyone—especially competing businesses—to verify the system's integrity through open-source code.
The system replicates computing across nodes protected by a mathematical protocol. This ensures applications remain secure and functional even if malicious actors gain control of some underlying hardware.
Infrastructure designed to be unstoppable, like the Internet Computer, presents a fundamental dilemma: it could enable rogue AIs, but it also offers a crucial check against concentrated power from governments or large corporations.
The goal for trustworthy AI isn't simply open-source code, but verifiability. This means having mathematical proof, like attestations from secure enclaves, that the code running on a server exactly matches the public, auditable code, ensuring no hidden manipulation.
