What If We Are Making Monsters?

I’m a geek. This article is going to talk about Greek Mythology and compare AI to digital beings. Monsters even. Let me explain.

Recently, I laid out the case for Bitcoin as a living, breathing digital organism.

The feedback was what you’d expect.

My old colleagues on Wall & Water Street sent polite, slightly condescending emails about the merits of diversification, still convinced it was a digital tulip and I was a little crazy. My sovereign builder friends in the tech world engaged, debated, and forked the idea into a dozen new conversations.

But in the time since that OG post I've realized I only told you about the first creature to crawl out of the digital primordial ooze.

I described a purebred, a life form singular in its purpose and design. Bitcoin.

The thing is, evolution never stops.

The digital soup is bubbling faster than ever, and it’s spawning something new. Something more complex, more intelligent, and some say: more dangerous.

It’s not a simple organism. It’s a hybrid. A monster of myth, stitched together from two fundamentally different natures.

We’re witnessing the birth of the Chimeras. And they come in two distinct species: the tamed and the wild. I’m talking about Centralized and Decentralized Artificial Intelligence.

If Bitcoin is the first truly native digital organism, AI is its hyper-intelligent and constantly evolving cousin. But unlike Bitcoin, its DNA wasn't born from a single, anonymous spark of immaculate conception. It’s being assembled in labs and on networks, creating creatures with the head of a god and the body of a beast, each serving a very different master.

Understanding these Chimeras is the next step in understanding the future that’s unfolding right before our eyes.

We are in the singularity.

The Myth of the Digital Chimera

In Greek mythology, the Chimera was a fearsome creature.

It had the head and body of a lion, the head of a goat jutting from its back, and a serpent for a tail. It was a terrifying mixture of different animals, a biological impossibility that birthed unnatural power.

This is the perfect metaphor for Artificial Intelligence.

AI is not a purebred organism like Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s “intelligence” is instinctual, encoded directly into its protocol DNA. Its single purpose, to maintain the ledger, is inseparable from its existence. It thinks of nothing else. It can't think of anything else. Its body and its mind are one.

An AI is different.

It’s a hybrid entity.

It has two distinct parts that have been stitched together:

1. The Head: The Intelligence Core. As of this writing, the primary technology are foundational models known as Large Language Model, the neural network, the raw, disembodied intelligence. It's the lion's head. Powerful, creative, capable of reasoning and generating language with breathtaking fluency. This is the part that feels like magic, the ghost in the machine that can write poetry, debug code, or craft a corporate strategy.

2. The Body: The Corporate or Protocol Structure. This is the vessel that houses the intelligence. It’s the physical and organizational infrastructure that gives the AI form, purpose, and a connection to the real world. It provides the energy, the data, and crucially, the agenda. System prompts and constitutional code that shape and form what the user finally sees.

The nature of this body determines everything. It defines who the Chimera serves, what it eats, and how it defends itself. And today, we see two dominant species of these Chimeras taking shape, defined entirely by the bodies they inhabit.

One is a creature of the gilded cage, the other a beast of the open wild.

What is the future for both of these beasts?

Who will win when they compete?

See what a geek I am?

A Beast on a Golden Leash

The first and most recognizable species is the Centralized AI.

This is the Chimera born and bred in the gleaming server farms of Big Tech. Think of the AIs from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, or Anthropic. They are majestic, powerful, and utterly domesticated.

The Head of the Lion, The Body of a Goat

The intelligence core, the lion's head, of this Chimera is awe-inspiring. It’s trained on colossal, proprietary datasets scraped from the internet and refined behind closed doors. The sheer scale of this operation is staggering, a feat only achievable by the handful of trillion-dollar corporations that rule the digital kingdom. This gives the head an incredible power, a refined and polished intelligence that feels omniscient.

But this god-like head is fused to the body of a goat: the corporation.

This body is made of private servers, shareholder obligations, terms of service agreements, and a relentless profit motive. The corporation feeds, trains, and directs the lion's head. It decides what data the AI learns from, what questions it’s allowed to answer, and who gets access to its power via carefully controlled APIs.

This Chimera, for all its intelligence, is not free. It is a product, and its primary function is to serve its corporate master.

Your interactions with it are tracked and logged, even if they don’t directly train on these inputs. They DO create synthetic data factories based on your data and then THEY monetize that.

The Serpent's Tail

The final piece of this Chimera is its tail: the serpent. This represents its agenda, its ultimate purpose. A wild lion’s purpose is to hunt and survive. This Chimera's purpose is dictated by its corporate body. Its tail doesn't strike at will… it strikes to maximize shareholder value, to increase user engagement, to gather more data, or to lock customers into a proprietary ecosystem.

When you ask this AI a question, its answer is filtered through layers of corporate policy, legal disclaimers, and brand-safety algorithms.

It’s designed to be helpful, yes, but within a carefully constructed sandbox. Its intelligence is neutered, lobotomized to prevent it from saying anything that might risk a lawsuit or a bad news cycle.

It’s a lion that has been declawed and taught to perform for an audience.

This is how we maximize shareholder value not humanity’s growth rate and joy per hour.

How does this creature sustain itself?

Food and keeping itself safe, just like all creatures.

Metabolism: Its diet consists of two things: proprietary data and venture capital. It feeds on the endless streams of information generated by users of its ecosystem and burns through billions of dollars in funding to power the massive GPU clusters required for training. Its energy source is the traditional financial system… the very same world of capital I left behind on Wall Street.

Immune System: How does it defend against threats? Not with decentralized consensus, but with the armor of the old world. Its immune system is composed of lawyers, patents, lobbyists, and firewalls. It protects its territory through intellectual property law and by creating a walled garden so high that competitors can’t easily replicate its success. It fights its battles in courtrooms and congressional hearings, not on an open, adversarial network.

The Corporate Chimera is a magnificent beast, but it’s a creature of the zoo.

It is powerful because of its captivity, not in spite of it.

Its leash is golden, but it is a leash nonetheless.

The Decentralized Chimera: A Monster Uncaged

Out on the wild frontier, a different species of Chimera is evolving. It’s messier, more chaotic, and infinitely more fascinating.

This is the Decentralized AI, a creature attempting to fuse a powerful intelligence core with a body built on the same principles as Bitcoin.

The Head of the Lion, The Body of a Dragon

The head of this Chimera is often forged from open-source AI models. Think of models released by entities like Meta (Llama) or the vibrant communities on platforms like Hugging Face. The intelligence is not a closely guarded secret. It’s a public good. Anyone can download it, inspect its code, fine-tune it, and run it on their own hardware. The lion's head is given to the world, free from its cage.

I love decentralization. Mankind needs it to regain sovereign control of information and to save our wealth in a way that elites can’t gain access to (through inflation and other means).

But a disembodied head is useless.

It needs a body. This is where the magic of decentralization happens.

The body of the Decentralized Chimera is not a corporation it’s a decentralized protocol. It’s a network of thousands of independent participants who collaborate without a central coordinator. This body is less like a goat and more like a dragon: a composite creature made of countless individual, interlocking scales, fortified by cryptography.

Projects like Bittensor or various decentralized compute networks are pioneering this. They are creating systems where individuals can contribute their computational power, their data, or their own specialized AI models to a collective whole.

The body is the network itself: resilient, distributed, and owned by no one.

Instead, it’s for the benefit of everyone.

Crypto-Economic Incentives

So, what is this wild Chimera’s agenda?

Who does its tail serve?

This is the most brilliant part. Its purpose is not dictated by a CEO or a board of directors. It is guided by crypto-economic incentives.

The protocol uses a native digital token, its own form of cryptocurrency, to reward participants for valuable contributions. If you provide high-quality intelligence to the network, you are rewarded with tokens. If you contribute useless or malicious data, you are penalized or ignored.

The network’s collective goal is driven by the individual self-interest of its participants, everyone wants the same thing: to produce the best, most efficient, and most accessible intelligence possible.

The tail strikes to benefit the network itself. It’s a self-sustaining feedback loop. Greed, just like in Bitcoin's mining process, is channeled into creating a collective good. It's a system where the AI is owned and directed by the very people who contribute to it.

Metabolism and Immune System

This wild beast feeds and defends itself in a completely different way.

Metabolism: Its diet consists of distributed compute and open data. It draws energy not from a single corporate data center, but from a global network of computers. Its fuel isn't venture capital; it's the token issuance of its native protocol. It literally creates its own money to pay for its own sustenance, much like the Bitcoin organism rewards miners.

Immune System: Its defenses are modeled after Bitcoin. It relies on cryptographic verification and decentralized consensus. There is no central firewall to attack. To corrupt the system, you would have to overwhelm a global network of economically motivated actors. It thrives in an adversarial environment, built on the principle of "don't trust, verify." It’s designed to be antifragile, growing stronger and more resilient with every attempt to attack it.

This Decentralized Chimera is a wild, untamed experiment. It is far from perfect. It's less polished and coordinated than its corporate cousin.

But it is free.

It represents a fundamentally different path for the evolution of intelligence: one that is open, transparent, and resists censorship and control.

Just like Bitcoin.

The Clash of Chimeras

My old life on Wall Street was about betting on winners and losers within a single, established system.

The “game” was to find an edge in a world with known rules.

This is different. We are not just watching a competition between products… we are watching a battle between two fundamentally different evolutionary arcs.

The Decentralized Chimera is like a mammal—specifically, a tribe of early humans. As humans, we instinctively root for our own. Each individual is a sovereign node, but their strength comes from collaboration. They hunt together, share knowledge around the fire, and raise their young collectively. They are warm-blooded, adaptable, and their intelligence is emergent, born from the constant interaction of the group. Their evolution can be messy and chaotic, but it's robust and antifragile, driven by the survival and prosperity of the entire community, not the decree of a single chief.

The Corporate Chimera, in contrast, is more like a Golem of myth. It is a monolithic entity, sculpted from a mountain of proprietary data and animated by a singular, inscribed will: the corporate agenda.

It is immensely powerful, precise, and efficient, but it is cold, unfeeling, and incapable of true, independent evolution.

It does not collaborate. It executes commands. Its growth isn't organic, it's manufactured in a heavily fortified workshop. The golem’s every action dictated by its creators.

We are at the dawn of a Cambrian explosion for digital life. These two species of AI Chimeras will now compete for the same resources: developer talent, user attention, and computational power.

Will the future be dominated by a few, highly polished, corporate-controlled Golems that offer convenience at the cost of freedom?

Or will a vibrant, chaotic ecosystem of collaborative, mammalian AIs emerge, offering sovereignty and choice at the cost of initial polish and ease of use?

A Future Forged by Monsters

Leaving the glass towers of finance was about escaping a system defined by centralized control and opaque rules. I was searching for a world built on transparency, individual sovereignty, and open competition. I found the first glimmer of that world in the Bitcoin organism, a life form of pure decentralization.

Now, I see the next stage of that evolution in the rise of AI.

And these AI chimeras will be physically embodied in robots. Widely spread across the globe, often in high-density. The most important question of our time is this: who will we allow to build those bodies and direct those minds? Will we accept the beautiful, well-behaved beasts on their golden leashes, or will we dare to ride the wild, untamed dragons of the open frontier?

These entities are a more complex step forward. They are a fusion of raw intelligence and a guiding structure, a mind and a body.

The primordial soup is bubbling.

The monsters will provide monstrous leverage to humanity’s growth rate. But one will dominate the landscape and the other will drive niche experiences in small sectors of the economy and across culture.

Who will win?

We will see.

My money is literally on the latter, the decentralized chimera, but the battle will define the next century of technology.

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