I was just chatting with a friend about AI vs crypto, and it reminded me of a personal story. I actually made my choice between the two seven years ago during undergrad.

I was doing my thesis in a computer architecture lab. There were two directions I could take:

1) Hardware acceleration for AI — a hot, well-established field with lots of prior work and support

2) Hardware acceleration for crypto — a niche area, barely anyone working on it, especially not zk

I started with AI. I read the ML books, played with models... and quickly got lost. I couldn’t explain anything. You train a model, tweak some random parameters (epochs, batch sizes, whatever), and out pop some weights. Sure, there’s math behind it, but it often feels more empirical than principled. Trial and error. Black magic. I don't know if OpenAI could have predicted how good GPT would become before it actually worked that well.

That lack of mathematical intuition bugged me. I’ve always needed to understand things deeply, to reason about systems, not just observe them. So I switched to the second path.

I went all-in on zk, from scratch. I was literally the only one working on it in my department. It was brutally hard, but it felt right. The math in cryptography is fundamentally different. You deal with polynomials, probabilistic proofs, number theory, all things that give you strong, provable guarantees. You know why something works. You can trace every step. There's beauty and certainty in that.

Maybe I’m just dumb when it comes to AI — I still don’t "get" how those weights emerge from training. And yes, things have changed with LLMs and AGI becoming real, and I’m definitely curious about the intersection. But regardless, to me, crypto still feels like pure science, elegant and beautiful :)