The Liberman Brothers on the Fate of Humanity: When 10 Billion Robots Meet AI Monopolies

When traditional capital invests trillions into centralized models like OpenAI, an opposing voice emerges. Lieberman brothers — creators of Snapchat, who sold the company for $64 million — have returned with a diagnosis: humanity faces a choice between sovereignty and digital feudalism. Their new project Gonka offers not data clouds but highways of computation. And their vision is staggering: in the future, the planet will have 10 billion robots.

Productivity as an existential crisis

According to David Lieberman, we are facing unprecedented acceleration. Over the past century, human productivity doubled every 30 years — a familiar, predictable rhythm of civilization. But embodied AI will break this math.

The Lieberman brothers don’t talk about tools for improvement — they see a phenomenon called the “explosion of productivity.” Imagine: each person gets a physical double working around the clock. Programmer? Their robot codes 24/7 in sync with their logic. Designer? A digital twin embodies their creativity in real time. This isn’t just doubling capabilities. It’s four- or tenfold expansion of humanity as a production unit.

Economists would call this overproduction. Wage systems, distribution of benefits, social contracts — all will collapse in the face of such scale. And the Libermans see this not as progress, but as a disaster for most, if computational power remains in the hands of a few.

Generative monopolies: the death of the open internet

The problem isn’t so much in the robots, but in the cage they’ll be placed in. The Lieberman brothers remember well the world after the iPhone: Apple and Google captured everything through the App Store. But the ambitions of giants in the AI era look much larger.

OpenAI, Google Gemini, Meta, xAI, Anthropic — they call it the “five-sided oligarchy.” Their target is clear: generative monopoly. When an AI model can create a full-fledged application from a user request in milliseconds, the App Store and the entire ecosystem of independent developers will simply disappear. Users will communicate directly with a monopolistic AI. Content distributors will become the rulers of logic.

This isn’t a technological race. It’s a fight for the right to determine every bit of information that humans see and hear. And profit here is just a side product of true power.

Is it worth mentioning the role of BlackRock and other financial giants supporting these “five”? When infrastructure is capital-intensive, rhetoric about open source becomes just a mask.

Gonka: highway instead of skyscrapers

Against this backdrop, the Lieberman brothers chose an unconventional path. “Centralized AI builds skyscrapers, but the world needs roads,” explains Daniil Lieberman.

Gonka is based on a simple idea: to rediscover the computing power that already exists. Bitcoin spends colossal calculations on “meaningless hashing.” Gonka proposes to re-convert this power into useful AI reasoning through a decentralized protocol.

Instead of Proof of Work, there’s Proof of Compute — a new consensus mechanism. Miners don’t need to work idle 24/7; they perform AI proofs and receive token rewards. The result? GPU compute costs drop several orders below AWS and other cloud monopolies.

Numbers speak for themselves: in 100 days, H100-level computing power grew from 60 blocks to over 10,000. An exponential growth. Bitfury invested $50 million in the project — a clear signal: decentralized AI infrastructure is inevitable.

Bubble and fiber optics: history repeats

The Lieberman brothers speak soberly about the so-called “AI bubble.” A bubble is crazy discounting of “future excess profits.” Giants value themselves as monopolistic owners of computing power. But when this power becomes cheap thanks to decentralization, premiums will vanish.

There’s a historical parallel. The dot-com bubble burst in 2000, but left a legacy: the transcontinental fiber optic network. It was on this infrastructure that Google, Amazon, and Facebook grew.

The brothers are confident: the AI bubble will eventually burst too. But the infrastructure it leaves behind will become the foundation for the next leap of civilization. Those who master low-cost decentralized channels of computation will be the first to break through the ashes.

Individual sovereignty in the age of 10 billion robots

If robots take away productivity, what remains for humans? The Lieberman brothers suggest two practical survival strategies.

First: a unique combination. A pure programmer will disappear before AI. But a developer who fluently speaks Russian, understands quantum physics, and has legal education — they are invulnerable. AI knows a lot, but cannot simulate life experience and cultural accumulation. This interdisciplinary “trinity” defines the level of questions you ask AI. This is the essence of Prompt Engineering.

Second: a position of responsibility. AI can compute, but cannot bear responsibility. In the future, execution will be cheap, but decision-making and approval will be costly. Those willing to take responsibility for AI’s output will become central nodes of the new system.

Geostrategic opportunity for small states

Here, the Lieberman brothers’ remark takes on a global meaning. Small countries cannot compete with the US and China in creating their own OpenAI. But they can access decentralized highways.

Using cheap electricity, localized ASIC chips, and open protocols like Gonka, small states can:

• Deploy their own computing infrastructure without bans on chips from great powers
• Create reputations as centers for AI talent
• Provide their citizens with “sovereign” access to computation

“Small countries don’t need to build skyscrapers; they just need a highway right at their doorstep,” say the Lieberman brothers.

The final choice: the singularity of power or the singularity of freedom

Human history is a story of the fight for sovereignty. It started with control over money. Bitcoin proved: sovereign currencies can be decentralized. Now the Lieberman brothers take on a more ambitious challenge — decentralize the most powerful productivity tool.

Closed source and monopolistic current AI giants lead to “digital Middle Ages.” Decentralized AI Gonka is the last chance for ordinary people to preserve sovereignty in the face of 10 billion robots.

The marathon has only begun. And the stakes are humanity’s future as an autonomous actor.

Additionally: this article is based on an interview with the Lieberman brothers and is not investment advice. Gonka as an emerging AI infrastructure faces risks of technological iterations and market volatility.