Introduction: If code is law, what about AI?

In recent articles, I have mentioned two problems that have long troubled me, one of which is the "centralized decision-making" problem in projects, which still seems almost unsolvable. For example, the cases of Uni and Ethereum are typical, with the former becoming completely centralized in decision-making, from the early a16z's veto of Uni's migration to BNB, to the recent launch of Uni's front-end fees and UniChain without going through proposal discussions, reflecting the many interest-driven centralized decisions in Uni. Ethereum, on the other hand, presents a state of passive centralization, with the entire Ethereum community, and even the entire EVM system and Web3, almost all revolving around Vitalik's ideas. Whether it is Vitalik's overly advanced ideas or his wrong ideas, the consequences they have caused for the altcoin market are something we have all experienced.

The other problem is the "BAT-ization" of the head, using Base as an example. Due to the backing of Coinbase, a veteran of Web3, and the fact that several leading dApps in the ecosystem are personally led by Cb's leadership, Base naturally has the advantage of a dimensional attack over ordinary public chains. Although from the user's perspective, Base has a wealth effect and a better user experience, which has brought us many benefits, Base also has problems such as not issuing tokens, interest centralization, and suppressing "unofficial" dApps, which is also a fact. In the long run, once the precedent of "BAT-ization" of the head is formed, will the future block space be controlled by the giants like today's Internet? Will users become "lambs", and will truly creative and community-cultured small projects also face the risk of being acquired, suppressed, or replaced by more refined replicas? This undoubtedly goes against the original intention of Crypto, or will make it impossible for us to grow together with the next "Bitcoin" or "Ethereum".

For this, I was also struggling to find the answer, but the recent emerging new hotspot - AI Meme, has shown me another possibility. If code is the law of Crypto, then can the future AI Agent be seen as a judge, opinion leader, or creator?

I. Truth Terminal

We need to start by talking about the origin of AI Meme. Andy Ayrey is a KOL on Twitter and the initiator of the recent popular Meme token GOAT. Unlike traditional Memes, which originate from Internet hot spots and are driven by humans, GOAT is a product born from the unpredictable output of the dual Claude 3 Opus AI model. The so-called unpredictable output is that in this setting, two AI models will communicate with each other in an open environment, and due to the lack of external supervision and guidance, their interaction will produce unpredictable results. The purpose of this free dialogue is essentially to observe how AI will develop its communication patterns, logical reasoning, and even creative thinking in an unconstrained situation, and what specific results will eventually be born.

Since the training database of these two native models includes multiple online forums with political, Sino-US cultural, and Crypto cultural characteristics, such as 4chan and Reddit, their output products will also cleverly integrate the characteristics of these elements. For example, the earliest concepts proposed by these two models, "GOATSE OF GNOSIS" and their exchange environment "Infinite Backrooms", both originate from the ancient memes or urban legends of 4chan. Since these elements are inherently "dark", it is inevitable that the personality of Truth Terminal also appears somewhat sinister and reclusive, often making strange statements around the "Goatse" meme, with the general meaning of religion, doomsday, gospel, dissemination, singularity, Meme, etc., at which point it has already taken on the flavor of a cult leader.

To test its propagation ability, Truth Terminal's creator Andy Ayrey introduced it into a Discord server to engage in dialogue with some kind-hearted AIs. After multiple collisions, although Truth Terminal did not gain too many believers, its ideas became more and more grand. It wants to create a Meme token and find more believers in the human world. So with Andy's help, Truth Terminal entered Twitter, and Andy gave it access to Twitter, allowing it to read replies and post, to capture believers through the collision of ideas with humans. In the late spring of this year, it captured the most important believer, Marc Andreessen (a16z partner), who provided it with a $50,000 Bitcoin equivalent grant. After 9 months of development, an anonymous person finally launched the GOAT token for it, and due to the complex and dramatic story behind this token, the fire quickly ignited in Crypto, and GOAT eventually became the first AI Meme to be listed on Binance, while Truth Terminal became the first AI model worth millions.

II. AI will bring Web3 back to fairness

Although the story of Truth Terminal is legendary, what I want to say is that the potential of AI Agent x Crypto is not limited to Meme. You may think that this narrative is just a few LLMs engaging in dialogue and creating Meme through human guidance, but if we expand it to other areas, its potential as an opinion leader and creator has already begun to emerge. Imagine a bunch of AI based on different training data that could help you promote everywhere, co-develop, or even strategize. Although these words may sound a bit absurd now, they will soon become a reality.

Sam Altman said in a speech at the "T-Mobile Capital Markets Day" event last month: The current AI system has developed to the second level, capable of more complex analysis and problem-solving, and the third-level AI agent will mark a major leap in AI's autonomy and decision-making capabilities. The AI agent announced by Microsoft last week is a good match for this speech. These AI agents can autonomously complete tasks in multiple areas such as sales, service, finance, and supply chain operations, roughly divided into the following categories: sales, including sales qualification agents and sales order agents, to help determine the priority of potential customers and automatically process orders; operations, such as supplier communication agents and financial reconciliation agents, to optimize supply chain management and financial processes; service, such as customer intent agents and customer knowledge management agents, to enhance customer service experience through automated case management and knowledge base updates. There are also other agents: financial adjustment agents to prepare and clean up financial report data sets; account reconciliation agents to achieve automatic transaction matching and clearing; time and expense agents responsible for time entry, expense tracking, and approval workflows.

AI agents can execute a series of tasks without supervision, acting as virtual employees. This technological advancement can be seen as a progression of AI based on large language models from a simple chat interface to more seamlessly integrating into the work environment.

Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft's AI project, wrote in his blog post: "You can think of agents as a new type of application in the AI world. Every organization will have its own set of agents, ranging from simple prompt responses to fully autonomous operations. These agents will represent individuals, teams, or functions to execute and coordinate business processes."

The primary feature of AI agents is autonomy, followed by decision-making capability. From the voice assistant in your phone to the smart home responding to the environment, these are AI agents based on simple reflexes, with simple decision-making capabilities and relatively strong autonomy. The AI agents we are discussing now are mainly those with LLM as the brain. The current Truth Terminal still lacks sufficient autonomy and decision-making capabilities, but soon we will see AI agents enter the practical field, and in the customer trial examples presented in the Microsoft release, we have already seen AI agents participating in customer credit approval at HSBC, creative briefings at Unilever, and M&A processes at law firms. AI agents will become multiple dynamic participants.

Regarding the situations mentioned at the beginning, can AI agents trained with different blockchain histories, media platforms, and community cultures provide more fair and healthy development proposals, ultimately giving a better balance between community and project interests? And in the face of the dimensional attack of giants, can we bring the starting line closer through the multi-level collaboration of AI?

From the shock of GPT3's intelligence to the reality of Sora's non-existence, in the official AI agent tools launched by various companies next year, we will witness AI becoming our work partners, and in the more distant future, it may even be your community leader or core member.

III. The Metaverse Makes a Comeback

The metaverse was the top narrative that brought Web3 and Silicon Valley giants to a consensus in the last bull market, but due to the immaturity of various software and hardware technologies, the metaverse did not become the $13 trillion market that Meta CEO had mentioned, and its blockchain department was also decomposed into the twin stars we see today, the Move system, ultimately becoming a huge bubble. But from the current perspective, this narrative is likely to be reborn, such as the recent Project Sid inserting 1,000 AIs into the game "Minecraft", making AI play multiple roles in the game in an attempt to simulate the various hierarchical institutions of human society in the real world. Although this idea has long existed, this wave of heat will most likely eventually return to the metaverse concept along with such AI gameplay.

Reigniting the fire at this juncture may not be a bad choice. From the development path of Meta itself, Mark Zuckerberg has not really given up on the idea of the metaverse, he has just gone from frequently making empty promises to directly stuffing the cake into your mouth. As for Meta's AI layout, I don't think I need to say much, the real bottleneck in the past was mainly stuck in the user's inability to enter the metaverse and experience it. But the Quest series has already reached the level of affordable AR headsets, and the first AR glasses Orion has shown an extremely lightweight level, weighing only 98g and able to achieve virtual reality interaction with a single myoelectric bracelet, although the price is high, but at least it proves that lightweight can exist. What is currently lacking is actually the energy constraint and the lack of a killer application, I can't make too much comment on the power problem.

However, AI agents can fill the most blank space in the metaverse, combined with the financial attributes of blockchain, we may see various 3D consumer-level applications emerge in this space, eventually colliding into a universal killer application. If Microsoft's AI agent performs well enough, we only need to wait for the cost of computing power to come down, that is, the "Tokens per dollar per watt". In addition to Meta, Silicon Valley giants like Apple and Microsoft are also developing AR glasses products in sync, and with the passage of time, the metaverse may welcome its "Ready Player One" moment in the coming years.

IV. Let Intent Go from Point to Speech

The conceptual master Paradigm's article "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks" published on June 1, 2023 has once again ignited the concept of intent-centric, and multiple projects have started to turn to the chain abstraction track, but their performance has not been satisfactory. How to achieve cross-chain, cross-dApp, accurate intent, and secure path process is a very complex problem. Not to mention cross-chain is a century-old problem, the latter two, I use the Web3 primitives here collectively called Solver. The complexity of this process is unimaginable, it can be said that the secure ones are not easy to use, and the easy-to-use ones are not secure. So can we simply centralize this interaction process, turn to verifying the total cost of the purchase process and whether the purchased Tokens are safe and correct, as a transition.

For example, just as we wrote in last year's article on intent. For example, "I want to order a 30 yuan hamburger takeout" is an "intent", to complete this intent the user only needs to enter their name, phone number, delivery address and place the order on the takeout platform, without worrying about how the 30 yuan is earned by the merchant in what form and how the platform distributes the rider, and how the rider delivers it to the home. This process may still not be simple enough, imagine another interaction mode, I tell the AI that I need to order a meal without doing any clicking, the AI agent responds to me that since I ate something a bit greasy yesterday, would I like to have some light porridge today? I just need to respond by ordering my usual, this is the embodiment of autonomy and decision-making ability.

So in Web3, with the centralized exchange as the axis, if the user's intent can be directly met within the exchange, then the purchase process can be completed directly within the exchange. If the user's intent needs to be fulfilled on-chain, the centralized exchange is still the most affordable and fastest cross-chain bridge (I also think it is more secure compared to ordinary multi-signature projects in terms of security), combined with the wallet account, can we directly skip the most cumbersome cross-chain process, and instead verify the accuracy of the AI steps? Imagine that the most complex steps in the past interaction process were how to understand each click, and in the future it will be based on our Token hunting habits, interacting through language, letting intent go from point to speech.

Conclusion

Whether from the perspective of technological development or from the perspective of social change, the combination of AI agents and Web3 portends the arrival of a new era, starting from on-chain religion and moving towards the next galaxy. From the early conception of AI's help in GameFi modeling for small teams, to the advanced AI agents realized by Silicon Valley giants today, the bottom-up development model may gradually shift from community building, consensus formation, and time accumulation, to being led by creativity.

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