Glen Weyl
Founder of Microsoft Research’s Special Project the Plural Technology Collaboratory, RadicalxChange
Glen Weyl, a leader at Microsoft involved with OpenAI’s ChatGPT development, has a background in exploring the use of blockchain for innovative voting and financing systems, such as Quadratic Voting and Quadratic Funding. He frequently speaks about the concept of plurality, which refers to a society where various groups strive to influence policies and collaborate in governance. In such a society, different groups, defined by culture or beliefs, maintain their distinct identities while being accepted by others.
Full Profile
Meet Glen Weyl
Web3, the metaverse, artificial intelligence, and social networks are rapidly reshaping society, the global economy, and fundamental values like democracy and pluralism. Glen Weyl is the world’s leading expert on how to use these emerging technologies to strengthen, advance, and renew those values.
As the principal intellectual collaborator of Vitalik Buterin (Founder of Ethereum), Jaron Lanier (father of virtual reality), and Audrey Tang (Digital Minister of Taiwan), Glen translates the dizzying possibilities of the future into clear, actionable insights.
Glen served on the leadership team of Microsoft’s Office of the CTO, where he helped guide the company’s relationship with OpenAI, and he now leads the primary industrial research group (the PTC) focused on how plural (free, democratic, and diverse) societies can flourish in the era of generative foundation models.
- Glen has founded and serves as research lead for the largest decentralized technology research group in the world.
- Glen has shaped two of the world’s most vibrant digital ecosystems: Ethereum’s decentralized community and Taiwan’s pioneering national digital democracy.
- As co-author of Radical Markets, Glen helped develop social technologies such as Quadratic Voting, now widely recognized as a gold standard for democratic innovation.
- As a geopolitics and macroeconomics advisor to Microsoft’s senior leaders, he has supported organizations navigating the intersection of global uncertainty and exponential technological change.
- As Founder of RadicalxChange and technical co-lead of the Committee for Pandemic Testing, Glen has united civil society, academia, government, and industry to address urgent and long-lasting social challenges.
He is co-author, with Eric Posner, of the 2018 book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, and co-author, with Puja Ohlhaver and Vitalik Buterin, of the 2022 paper Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul—one of the 30 most downloaded papers in the Social Science Research Network’s history within its first year.
Glen is collaborating with Taiwan’s Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, on an open, Web3-based book project, Plurality: Technology for Cooperative Diversity and Democracy. He is also the author of dozens of scholarly and popular works published in venues such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Economic Review, the Harvard Law Review, the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, and The New York Times.
He has been named one of the 10 most influential people in blockchain by CoinDesk, one of the 25 people shaping the next 25 years of technology by WIRED, and one of the 50 most influential people by Bloomberg Businessweek—all in 2018. Glen graduated as Valedictorian of his Princeton undergraduate class in 2007 and earned his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 2008.
Talks
AI carries twin and seemingly contradictory threats: of destroying the social fabric through omnipresent and persuasive deception and of concentrating power in a “singularity” of model creators or models themselves. These two threats are narrowing the corridor in which plural (free and democratic) societies can thrive. To avoid this Scylla and Charybdis, we must harness these tools to proactively widen that corridor, a strategy that has been labeled “Plurality” by its leading practitioner, Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang who has made that country the light to the free world. Drawing on his forthcoming book jointly with her, Glen will show you how to harness Plurality to improve health, fuel productivity and create a richer media environment, all by harnessing and while contributing to human diversity and cooperation through digital technology
The next wave of generative foundation models (GFMs) succeeding ChatGPT and DALL-E, will make indistinguishable and arbitrarily manipulable simulation of human content (e.g. video, voice, documents) ubiquitous, liquidating much of the foundation of social cooperation and trust.
Maintaining trust and collaboration will require a revolution in verification and dramatically expanded applications of cryptography. Luckily Web3 ecosystems like Ethereum and countries like Taiwan have been coping with similar threats for years now. In this talk, Glen will draw lessons from these experiences to help individuals and organizations of all sizes survive and thrive in this disruption
Glen Weyl is the co-inventor of Quadratic Funding, the hottest new approach to supporting social entrepreneurship and cross silo-collaboration within companies, is Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist and Founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
Glen will explain how QF works, how it has been mathematically proven as the optimal way to support public goods and how it is transforming open-source software, the blockchain, media and social service provision. Whether you’re looking to tap the wisdom of your employees to catalyze new cross-company entrepreneurship or catalyze effective charitable giving, QF is one of the most powerful tools available today and there’s no one better to learn about it from than its pioneer.
Glen Weyl, a former professor of economics at the University of Chicago, developed the economic theory behind many recent advances in antitrust policy, from the 2010 US merger guidelines to the use of antitrust to protect workers. As Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist, he is today at the forefront of technology competition and regulatory policy.
His talk will cover some of the most innovative approaches to addressing the problems of technology monopoly platforms, including treating data as labor, forming collective bargaining institutions such as data coalitions, the democratization or utilization of platforms and the use of new open protocols to facilitating meaningful portability. Today every company is a digital company and we all depend on the infrastructure controlled by a few dominant technology platforms. Here is a clear glimpse into the future that will determine the fate of your business and how you can shape it.