Why the Liberman Brothers Believe AI's Future Depends on Decentralized Computing

The brothers who sold a company to Snapchat for $64 million are back—and they’re warning about a productivity crisis that could reshape society. Daniil and David Liberman, founders of Gonka.ai, argue that artificial intelligence will soon flood the world with 10 billion robots, creating unprecedented economic upheaval unless humanity regains control over computing power. Their message is stark: centralized AI monopolies will lock away the future, or decentralized networks will set it free. There’s no middle ground.

The Robot Multiplication: When AI Creates 10 Billion Digital Twins

The Liberman brothers start with a striking observation about productivity growth. For the past century, human output has roughly quadrupled every 30 years. But that trajectory is about to shatter. When embodied AI matures—when every programmer has a tireless robot twin working around the clock, or every designer has an AI that extends their creativity in real time—the productivity equation becomes unrecognizable.

Their prediction is blunt: there will be 10 billion robots on Earth. These won’t be confined to factory floors. Instead, they’ll be physical and digital extensions of human capability—personal production units that multiply individual output by four, five, or even ten times over.

This isn’t just technological progress. The Liberman brothers frame it as an existential crisis. When robots can do what humans do faster and cheaper, labor markets collapse. Wage distribution systems that governed the past century become obsolete. Social security contracts built on 20th-century assumptions about work and value suddenly crumble. Humanity faces what they call an “extreme overproduction” crisis.

The Monopoly Trap: Who Controls the Digital Future?

But production capacity is only half the problem. The other half—and potentially the more dangerous one—is this: who owns it?

The Liberman brothers studied how Apple and Google dominated mobile through the App Store. Giants controlled distribution, and developers had no choice but to comply. The AI era is worse. When artificial intelligence can generate fully functional software in milliseconds from a user’s description, the App Store becomes meaningless. Users won’t download apps; they’ll ask AI directly.

This means companies like OpenAI, Google, and a handful of others—what the Liberman brothers call “generative monopolies”—will directly sever the link between developers and users. They’ll become the definers of digital reality. If an AI controls every line of code you see, every decision you make, and every output you receive, these companies become the architects of your thoughts.

The concentration is already happening. Five corporations—OpenAI, xAI, Gemini (Google), Meta, and Anthropic—are locked in a race for control over the fundamental logic of AI itself. Behind them stands BlackRock and other mega-capital funds, bankrolling infrastructure so expensive that only companies backed by trillions can afford it.

Gonka: Building Roads Instead of Skyscrapers

Faced with this algorithmic consolidation, the Liberman brothers didn’t retreat to academic debate. They launched Gonka, a decentralized AI computing network built on a radical premise: equal access to computing power.

Daniil Liberman explains the philosophy simply: “Centralized AI builds skyscrapers. What the world needs are roads.”

The mechanism is elegant. Bitcoin miners waste computing power on “meaningless hashing.” Gonka’s protocol recycles that same power into useful AI reasoning. Through an innovation called Proof of Compute, miners validate AI computations in seconds instead of sitting idle. They earn token rewards. GPU compute costs plummet—several orders of magnitude cheaper than AWS.

The adoption curve proves something important: there’s desperate demand. Within 100 days of launch, Gonka’s H100-level computing capacity surged from 60 blocks to over 10,000 blocks. The blockchain industry has been sitting on computing power anxiety for years. Gonka provided an outlet. When Bitfury invested $50 million, it signaled that future AI infrastructure will be distributed, permissionless, and globally accessible—not centralized in data center deserts controlled by a few corporations.

After the Bubble Pops: Infrastructure as Legacy

The tech world obsesses over whether AI is in a bubble. The Liberman brothers offer a different perspective entirely. Yes, it’s a bubble. But not in the way people think.

The bubble exists because giants are desperately extracting “future excess profits” today—betting that their monopoly will be permanent. But the moment decentralized networks like Gonka bring computing costs down dramatically, those monopoly premiums vanish. The $100,000-per-hour GPU rental becomes $10,000, then $1,000.

When this happens, the bubble bursts.

But here’s what the Liberman brothers learned from the dot-com crash: bubbles leave behind infrastructure. When the internet bubble exploded in 2000, fiber optic cables remained crisscrossing the planet. Those cables powered the next 20 years of innovation.

The AI bubble will leave behind something similar—decentralized, intelligent infrastructure. The question is who will control it. Whoever masters low-cost, high-efficiency computing channels before the bubble bursts will be positioned to thrive afterward.

Individual Survival in a World of 10 Billion Robots

When robots multiply your productivity tenfold, what remains distinctly human? The Liberman brothers, who position themselves as both entrepreneurs and “applied philosophers,” offer two survival strategies.

First: Become irreplaceable through cross-disciplinary mastery. A pure programmer is vulnerable. An AI will replicate that skill. But a developer fluent in Russian literature, quantum physics, and contract law? That person is invincible. AI models excel at isolated domains but struggle to replicate the complex, interdisciplinary cognition that emerges from lived human experience and cultural depth.

This unique combination determines the depth of questions you ask AI—the essence of prompt engineering—and creates a barrier around your creative output that algorithms cannot easily cross.

Second: Claim responsibility. AI can execute and compute, but it cannot be held accountable. In future social contracts, execution becomes cheap. Decision-making and responsibility become expensive. The individuals and organizations who openly own responsibility for AI outputs will become the central nodes in tomorrow’s collaborative systems.

Geopolitical Breakaway: How Small Nations Avoid the Chip Ban

The Liberman brothers identify an opportunity for countries locked out of US and Chinese chip access. Instead of waiting for permission from Washington or Beijing, smaller nations can participate in open-source protocols like Gonka.

By deploying locally cheap electricity and ASIC hardware, they gain access to global decentralized networks. They can build sovereign-level AI talent by encouraging developers to contribute code and establish reputation. They bypass chip bans not through defiance but through architecture.

“Small countries don’t compete on skyscraper height,” the Liberman brothers explain. “They just need an AI highway at their doorstep.”

The Final Sovereignty Question

The Liberman brothers frame this as more than a business venture. It’s a social experiment and perhaps a final reckoning over who controls humanity’s future.

OpenAI’s closed ecosystem, they argue, is a fast-track to a “digital Middle Ages”—where ordinary people become serfs serving corporate algorithms. Decentralized AI, embodied by Gonka and similar projects, offers a different path: ordinary people retaining sovereignty over their own productivity and reasoning.

Bitcoin proved that money could be decentralized. The Liberman brothers are attempting to prove something equally radical: that the world’s most advanced computing tools don’t need to be locked in corporate data centers. They can flow to the fingertips of anyone with autonomy and ambition.

Disclaimer: This article draws from recent interviews with Daniil and David Liberman regarding Gonka protocol principles and does not constitute investment advice. As emerging AI infrastructure, Gonka faces technological and market risks. Readers are encouraged to research independently before making any decisions.