AI Can Ace the Footnotes, but Vitalik Says It Still Misses the Plot

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says AI is extremely knowledgeable but not very wise, with chatbots capable of detecting references to almost anything while making only surface-level judgments about what a text argues. His comments emerged in an X debate over whether chatbots rival the best human readers, a distinction relevant to crypto users who feed whitepapers and governance proposals to AI tools.

The discussion began with a Wall Street Journal report on Humanities 10, a demanding Harvard course for freshmen. Applications rose 40% this fall, with 180 students competing for 90 seats. Students face a heavy book each week, and the course bans devices. Several applicants said they wanted an antidote to AI shortcuts. One user argued that today’s models beat any human as discussion partners on classics because they have read everything, while a writer pushed back, calling chatbot feedback on her own essays “slop” for now.

Buterin joined the thread and wrote: “I find AI to be extremely knowledgeable, and so exceptionally able to detect references to almost anything, but not very wise, and so it only makes the most surface-level judgements about what point some writing is making. This is particularly true when it's analyzing writing…” — vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 29, 2026

He said AI’s knowledge is easier to identify than its limited wisdom because wisdom, unlike intelligence, may by definition be difficult to verify. The weakness grows, he added, when a model encounters a text for the first time; famous works, by contrast, arrive with extensive human analysis in the training data.

The comments follow Buterin’s warning that AI could weaken key parts of crypto security within two years. He has also built a paranoid mode for AI chats and backed an AI model that limits hacking, while crypto teams continue handing audits, research and governance summaries to AI agents. Not everyone shares his skepticism, with some investors arguing that AI already beats top human minds in math.