Author: Weilin, PANews
To get closer to the community, Shaw, who had always been behind the scenes focusing on technology, stepped into the limelight. In late December, during the most important overseas holiday - Christmas, Shaw and his wife chose to meet with community developers in China. From Shanghai to Beijing and then to Hong Kong, Shaw's schedule was very tight, and he was queued up for questions at every event.
As the token market value of the hottest AI agent project a16z has already exceeded $1 billion. The core of a16z is ElizaOS, a powerful multi-agent simulation framework aimed at creating, deploying and managing autonomous AI agents, built with TypeScript and able to interact across multiple platforms, and many projects have been developed based on this well-received open-source framework.
On December 26, at the a16z community exchange event held in Beijing, PANews had an in-depth dialogue with the founder of a16z and the creator of ElizaOS, Shaw, to discuss the original intention, progress and future development direction of the project, as well as his views on the future of AI Agents.
Shaw said he is not a money lover, but his development work aims to provide investment opportunities for ordinary people, so that the crypto ecosystem can shift from speculative to generative, getting rid of gambling-style betting on this token or that token, but investing in things that truly expand the pie.
In terms of project progress, a16z will soon announce the list of partners to increase transparency, and will announce a new proposal for the a16z token economics around January 1. Shaw believes that in the face of how to deal with an AI-managed world, people should have their own data and models, and high decentralization is the key.
The original intention of a16z: to give ordinary people the opportunity to become investors
In the interview, Shaw frankly admitted that the birth of a16z stems from observing the current investment landscape and a desire for fair investment opportunities. He mentioned: "If you want to invest in top startups like Uber or OpenAI, you have to be an institutional investor like a16z. Ordinary people have almost no access to these opportunities."
Shaw believes that crypto ecosystems like Solana can shift from speculative to generative, getting rid of gambling-style betting on this token or that token, but investing in things that truly expand the pie, just like companies and software. For example, when a16z, Paradigm or other large venture capital firms invest in software companies, they also incorporate them into their own networks to drive value realization. They make money because they create something of great value. Shaw hopes that similar opportunities can be widely used by ordinary people and the community.
He recalled the startup stage of the project: "I collaborated with baoskee from daos.fun. We had lunch together, and I said at the time that I wanted to do an AI version of a16z. He said, 'Let's just call it a16z, put it together.' So we started working on it right after that lunch."
Latest progress: Partner list to be announced, new a16z token economics proposal
With the token market value of a16z exceeding $1 billion, Shaw revealed a series of exciting project dynamics. In the short term, Shaw believes that many people in the crypto field do not understand DeFi and do not know how to use the funds in their wallets to earn more returns like banks or other financial institutions. a16z hopes to build a bridge to connect DeFi and ordinary users.
Therefore, a16z is developing some tools, such as an automated liquidity pool (LP) Agent. This agent can automatically manage liquidity pools for users to help them earn income. The autonomous investor tools developed by a16z allow the community to invest in the projects they believe in. And this autonomous investor is not just decided by AI what to invest in, but by the collective decision of the community, with AI listening to everyone's opinions, summarizing them into an investment thesis, and then making decisions on behalf of the community. a16z is interested in how AI can solve many coordination and communication problems within DAOs and communities, helping them make collective decisions.
In addition, Shaw said that the project team will officially announce the list of all partners to increase project transparency and help the community understand the specific scope of cooperation with each party more clearly. Regarding the token economics, in response to the controversy in the industry about the unclear token economics, a16z will publish a brand new token economics proposal around January 1. The proposal is designed by professionals from multiple teams and will include LP pairing mechanisms, DeFi function integration and other content. In addition, the project team also revealed that they have acquired a Launchpad company, which will be used for the official launch of AI agents in the future.
At the same time, the AI Pool project that Shaw has recently supported on social media has attracted market attention. Shaw said that AI Pool is created by the partner Skely, so it is mainly his project, but it is built on our ElizaOS technology. It demonstrates a process similar to pump.fun, but this process happens in a more fair way on social media, so users don't need to go elsewhere. This also demonstrates a truly autonomous agent, which is completely autonomous - a16z has no control over it and cannot access the private key. It cannot withdraw funds, cannot manipulate it, it just runs autonomously.
Facing competition from Zerebro and ARC, he admits they are good complements
Shaw said that projects like ARC (written in Rust) and Zerepy (written in Python) are good complements to the work a16z is doing on Eliza OS. "I know Swarm's reputation, they are known for stealing the achievements of famous researchers and applying them in an essentially ineffective way. So I won't put it on this list. But for any real open source project and real developers who like to collaborate, I'm very willing to work with them. This week I contributed to Zerepy. We also collaborate with Zerebro, although people think it's our biggest competitor, but in fact we are partners."
Currently, DeFi, gaming and social media are the three main pillars of a16z's work. Shaw believes that social media helps gain attention and rapid growth; DeFi provides the greatest value to ordinary users, helping them earn income more safely; gaming also attracts a lot of interest. Currently, Treasure DAO's Smolworld and Loot Realms' Eternum are using Eliza technology for development. Although these three are the most obvious directions, there may be more areas emerging in the future.
In summary, Shaw's advice to the project team and users is that anything that can help users make money, save money or improve their lives will definitely stand out. "I think just promoting a token, like sending a lot of messages and spamming on Twitter, may not be as important as it used to be, especially as more and more agents emerge. The focus will be more on what this agent can do, what it can do for me. So the focus should be on lowering the threshold for using things like financial products, bringing applications that originally required website access to social platforms, and overall making the user experience simpler."
Future Trends: Different Stages of AI Agents, How to Deal with AI Takeover of the World
Currently, AI agents have gone through different stages of development, from initially being memes to expanding into social, then into infrastructure and investment analysis. In Shaw's view, the biggest trend he is currently seeing is that websites are migrating to social media.
People's past purposes for visiting websites may now be achievable through proxies on social media. This trend suggests that people are looking for ways to integrate applications directly into social media. He said he had previously communicated with someone developing a travel booking proxy, and we are also collaborating with someone developing a real estate booking system. A clear DeFi example is Clanker, which is being developed for Forecaster. I think this is a good example of this trend, where you take the pump.fun model and put it directly on social media, creating a social minting experience that is more interesting, self-promotional and self-marketing, and users don't have to leave the social platform to use the application. I think thousands of applications will follow this trend in the future.
Looking to the future, Shaw emphasized that diversity and high decentralization are key to preventing AI takeover of the world. He said decentralization can ensure that each community has full control over its proxies and can effectively address the risk of AI takeover.
"I think the most important thing is diversity, making AI proxies very different from each other. They use different models, strategies and methods, built by different teams with different incentive mechanisms, creating a more robust network that makes it very difficult for any AI to take over. It is also very important that all of this is highly decentralized, and that we have our own data and models, and that each community can fully control its own proxies. This way, in the hypothetical case of an AI takeover, this AI would have to fight against many other AIs. There should not be just one super-intelligent AI, but many super-intelligent AIs, making it much more difficult for any AI to gain any advantage.
