Bridge Atlas - Episode 5: Verifiability | Shreya Shankar & Justin Drake
Duration: 00:59:35
Speaker:
Type: Talk
Expertise:
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
Shreya Shankar is a PhD student at UC Berkeley’s Electrical engineering and Computer Science Department. She builds open-source LLM-powered data systems, including the DocETL stack. Justin Drake is leads the Lean Ethereum initiative, an ambitious roadmap for Ethereum’s long-term development. Justin and Shreya build bridges between the fields of artificial intelligence and cryptography through a conversation that ranges from trust to tensions. This is a technical conversation, but high-level enough for generalists to engage with.
Last chance to sign up for Bridge Atlas Day at Devconnect: https://devconnect.org/calendar?event=bridge-atlas
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References
- Shreya’s guest talk: https://www.youtube.com/live/xyCHcCeVonQ
- Lean Ethereum: https://blog.ethereum.org/2025/07/31/lean-ethereum
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00:00 - Start, Justin and Shreya Intros
08:38 - The Spectrum of Trust
12:31 - Using AI evals to structure data
14:57 - Measures of decentralization
22:05 - Counterfactuals and other missing information
28:02 - Maliciousness is easier to manage than incompetence
33:58 - Inherent tensions in verifiability
43:35 - Cryptographic currency for facilitating AI alignment
49:32 - Sibling concepts to verifiability
55:05 - Closing thoughts
