Bankless · Monday, July 27, 2026
Vlad Novikovski reflected on his early work with AI precursors during a research competition in his youth, which focused on using optics to run neural networks. He noted that while lauded at the time, the scientific community considered machine learning a 'dead end,' a sentiment he later revisited due to the rise of big data.
“The project I did for that was essentially, like, using optics to... instead of chips to like run neural networks faster.”
“And the Nobel laureates, you know, and they were, I think, expressing the opinion of the scientific community at the time. They were like, yeah, all this like machine learning stuff, like that's a dead end. Like you, like, it's kind of, it's cute that you did this work as a kid, but like, if you want to do science, like do quantum, like this neural network stuff is not going to work.”
“But the actual, like, connecting that with, you know, because you have to meet the customers where they are, right? It's like, you could build... You could sit in an ivory tower and say, like, okay, how would you build the perfect system to replace TradFi? Yeah. Like, that's not really how companies get built.”