Jessy,
Recently, the founder of AI16Z, Shaw, launched an FUD attack on an AI Agent project called Swarms on the X platform, stating on the X platform that the founder of Swarms is a scammer and does not know how to write code.
Affected by this news, the project token SWARMS of Swarms plummeted more than 20% in 24 hours, but it still maintains a surge of over 400% in 7 days, with a current token market value of nearly $300 million.
In addition to the direct confrontation by the founder of AI16Z, which has caused a considerable public opinion storm, Swarms and AI16Z have been in constant controversy on Twitter during this period, and their differences in technical architecture and application have also sparked widespread discussion.
Although the AI Agent track is currently a blue ocean, the competition is also very fierce, especially the leading Virtuals Protocol and AI16Z ecosystem projects, which occupy more than 50% of the market value of this track. For a project that does not rely on these two "AI Agent groups", how does Swarms break through the siege? What innovations and unique features does the project itself have? And is its founder Kye Gomez really a scammer who can't even write code, as Shaw claims?
Swarms, from Web2 to Web3
Swarms was initiated by the current 20-year-old Kye Gomez in 2022 and is a multi-agent LLM framework for developers. The project, through smart orchestration and efficient collaboration, allows multiple AI Agents to collaborate like a team to solve complex business operation needs. The framework provides powerful scalability, supports seamless integration with external AI services and APIs, and also provides long-term memory capabilities for AI Agents to enhance contextual understanding.
In its latest whitepaper, Swarms explains its concept and unique features in detail. According to the whitepaper, Swarms is a multi-agent collaborative AI Agent, which is different from individual intelligent agents like GPT-4. While these individual intelligent agents are powerful, they have significant limitations in handling complex tasks. In contrast, the multi-agent collaborative AI Agent of Swarms allows the agents to collaborate, specialize, and each focus on their own strengths, thereby improving overall efficiency.
Swarms' algorithm aims to solve various challenges in multi-agent collaboration, such as task allocation, resource management, and coordination. Through the Swarms algorithm, agents can quickly exchange information, automatically allocate tasks based on task requirements and their own capabilities, to ensure that each task is executed by the most suitable agent.
It can be seen that the core concept of its operation is inspired by the collective intelligence systems in nature, such as bee swarms and ant colonies, introducing this efficient collaboration model into the field of artificial intelligence, emphasizing the seamless cooperation between multiple AI agents to handle complex tasks.
The project's token is SWRAMS, which serves as the universal currency for transactions and collaboration between intelligent agents. Agents can use SWRAMS tokens to pay service fees, acquire data resources, and participate in market transactions.
In the design of this project, the Swarm algorithm provides key support for agent collaboration, while the SWARMS token, as the universal currency of the agent economy, plays an irreplaceable role in promoting agent transactions and incentivizing agent participation in economic activities. According to the latest news from the project team, in the upcoming new features, users will be able to buy and sell agents using SWARMS tokens.
According to Kye Gomez, the Swarms development framework has currently spawned over 45 million AI Agents, providing efficient solutions for industries such as finance, insurance, and healthcare.
Initially, the project was only a Web2 AI Agent project, and according to the founder, it has been running for three years. The project officially transitioned from Web2 to Web3 on December 18, 2024, when it launched its token.
The project currently enjoys a high community presence among the many AI Agents, which is inseparable from its product concept and innovation. Industry insiders generally believe that the next stage of the AI Agent industry is group collaboration (Agent Swarms), where communication and cooperation between multiple agents can achieve more efficient work. This approach allows agents from different frameworks to interact and leverage their specialized advantages in specific tasks and scenarios. Swarms has seized this development trend.
Another reason for the project's explosive growth that cannot be ignored is the controversial figure behind it, the founder Kye Gomez.
The controversy behind the genius founder
Swarms' core founder, Kye Gomez, is hailed as a "genius youth" in the field of artificial intelligence. In his self-introduction, he stated that he dropped out of high school, yet he developed Swarms and successfully operated 45 million AI Agents within three years, which has attracted people's attention and curiosity.
Not only has he founded the Swarms project, but according to the information, he also has other outstanding projects and research achievements in the field of AI. For example, at the open-source AI research lab Agora, he has focused on the integration of AI and biology, as well as nanotechnology, providing technical support for the intersection of these two frontier fields. Additionally, he has developed Pegasus, a project focused on natural language processing and embedding models, and has also participated in the open-source implementation of AlphaFold3, providing tool support for research in the field of biology.
In his self-introduction, Kye Gomez wrote, "I grew up in one of the worst cities in Florida, Hialeah, which is a fourth-world hell with rampant crime. I never finished high school. In fact, I was expelled from three high schools."
After high school, he never went to college. He only had an office in the small town of Doral in Miami. And he mastered PyTorch skills, able to implement research papers without code, as large academic and industrial researchers do not want to open-source their code.
Then, when some of these implementations became popular because they were genuinely useful, such as the Thought Tree, he was subjected to cruel attacks from the AI elite, who wanted to claim all the attention and credit for work that was not their own, such as the people behind Tree of Thoughts and OpenAI.
Since last year, he has implemented models for hundreds of research papers for free, without any reward other than the endless verbal harassment from the elite and their rulers.
From his self-introduction, we can see that Kye Gomez, as a young person from a "small town", despite having high talent, has had to carve out his own place in the elite-dominated AI field through his own talents for a long time.
This may explain why Swarms has been deeply rooted in Web2 for a long time, but has recently turned to Web3. Web3 can better enable him to "monetize his talents". The facts have proven that his choice is correct, as Swarms has taken off, with a current market value of $300 million.
In media reports, Kye Gomez started learning programming at the age of 10 and applied his new programming knowledge to games, which also led Gomez to understand artificial intelligence. Gomez has said that at the age of 13, he created his first AI model to hack his mother's Gmail account and obtain PlayStation codes to shop on the platform. From that time on, Gomez became obsessed with artificial intelligence and data science. Previously, he also developed an AI assistant based on Slack through APAC AI.
Kye Gomez's earliest breakthrough was not due to his released products, but because he questioned OpenAI's new product and accused it of plagiarizing Swarms. In 2024, OpenAI released an open-source product - the Swarm framework, for building, orchestrating, and deploying multi-agent systems. Seeing this product, Kye Gomez stated, "The Swarms framework is the first production-grade multi-agent orchestration framework ever. OpenAI has stolen our name, code, and methods. From the syntax of the agent structure to the Swarm class objects, all content comes from our codebase."
While Kye Gomez publicly questioned OpenAI's plagiarism, it did not generate public support for him. Some netizens dug up his previous history of extortion, and they felt that based on the README documents published on GitHub by both sides, OpenAI's version seemed more credible. The general public opinion was that Kye Gomez was hard-pressed to claim plagiarism and had the suspicion of extortion. As for Kye Gomez's plagiarism allegations, OpenAI did not respond.
The entanglement between Swarms and AI16Z
Facing the rapidly growing project Swarms, the founder of AI16Z, Shaw, also couldn't sit still. He said on X that the founder of Swarms is a scammer and can't write code. However, netizens are not impressed by Shaw's remarks, and more of them are asking Shaw to "mind his own business".
Currently, the projects in the AI16Z ecosystem are undoubtedly the hottest stars in the AI Agent track, and its founder Shaw has enough say in the industry, known as the "Godfather of AI".
His questioning of Kye Gomez has undoubtedly sparked heated discussions among everyone. The discussion within the community not only focuses on Kye Gomez himself, but more on the comparison between the two products. The comparison between the two is mainly concentrated on Eliza and Swarms. Eliza is an open-source modular architecture developed by Shaw, mainly used to create AI Agents that can seamlessly interact with users and blockchain systems.
AI16Z is designed based on this framework, and AI16Z itself has also become a representative project of the AI Agent framework.
The most significant difference between these two products is that Eliza is for a single AI Agent, while Swarms is for the coordination of multiple AI Agents. To explain it in more common terms, the difference in terms of development is that Eliza is an AI Agent development framework, and developers can quickly build an AI Agent project according to this framework. Swarms, on the other hand, provides some tools for developers, and developers who want to create AI Agents using Swarms can use these tools and experience to freely develop their own AI Agent projects that are not as highly standardized, and Swarms is more focused on unleashing the collaboration between AI Agents.
It can be said that Eliza is the present of blockchain AI Agents, while Swarms is the future of AI Agent development. This is also the part that makes Swarms full of imagination.
