Money Moves Like Water, but It Has Barely Touched AI

Micky Malka, the fintech investor who leads Ribbit Capital, was explaining his belief that companies are becoming token factories when he pointed to what was missing. Four or five years into the artificial intelligence boom, he told his interviewer, money has barely been touched.

"Money is supposed to be one of the first most fungible things that should be playing the game and it's not." Fungible means interchangeable, where one dollar equals another dollar.

By token, Malka means machine readable information. The leading AI labs, in his telling, take material from across the internet and the wider world and turn it into a new set of tokens that other companies consume as raw material.

Malka said money should have been among the first things AI pulled in because he follows flows and nothing is static. Everything flows to money, he said, and money itself is never still, like gravity that always moves and like water that is never stuck.

For something that dynamic, he said, money is still not attached to AI. He expects that to change where blockchain technology meets AI, because people will need what he called intelligent smart contracts that do things on their behalf. A blockchain, in plain terms, is a shared digital record that works as a shared ledger for those contracts.

Malka pointed to Patrick Collison, Stripe's chief executive, as one of the entrepreneurs working on the problem. His interviewer replied that he had just heard Stripe executive John Collison describe his own work the same way, as payments for agents.

Knowledge has moved much faster into AI, Malka said, while money is behind. He named Vlad Tenev, Robinhood's CEO, who is tokenizing assets for equities, as another early sign of how money may finally connect.