Author: Jessy, Jinse Finance
Recently, AI16Z founder 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 plunged 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 AI16Z founder that sparked a lot of public opinion, Swarms and AI16Z have been in constant controversy on Twitter recently, and their differences in technical architecture and applications 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 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 said?
Swarms, Transitioning from Web2 to Web3
Swarms, initiated by the current 20-year-old Kye Gomez in 2022, 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 elaborates on its concept and unique features. 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 can enable agents to collaborate with each other, specialize in division of labor, and each focus on their own strengths, thereby improving overall efficiency.
The Swarms algorithm aims to solve many 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 to pay service fees, acquire data resources, participate in market transactions, etc.
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 just a Web2 AI Agent project, and according to the founder, the project 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 very 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 professional advantages to perform better in specific tasks and scenarios. Swarms has seized this development trend.
Another reason that has made its project a sensation and cannot be ignored is that the project's founder, Kye Gomez, is an extremely controversial figure.
The Controversy Behind the Genius Founder
Kye Gomez, the core founder of Swarms, is hailed as a "genius teenager" in the field of artificial intelligence. In his self-narration, he stated that he dropped out of high school, and his experience of developing Swarms and successfully operating 45 million AI Agents within three years has attracted people's attention and curiosity.
Not only has he started the Swarms project, but according to the information, he also has other outstanding projects and research results in the AI field. For example, at the open-source AI research lab Agora, he has set his sights on the integration of AI and biology, nanotechnology, providing technical support for the intersection of these two frontier fields. In addition, he has developed Pegasus, a project focused on natural language processing and embedding models; he has also participated in the open-source implementation of AlphaFold3, providing tool support for research in the field of biology.
In his self-narration, 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, I never went to college. I just had an office in a small town in Doral, Miami. And I mastered PyTorch skills, able to implement research papers without code, because large academic and industrial research teams don't want to open-source their code.
Then, when some of the implementations became popular because they were actually useful, like the Thought Tree, I was subjected to the cruel attacks of the AI elite, who wanted to get all the attention and credit for work that wasn't theirs, like the people behind Tree of Thoughts and OpenAI now.
Since last year, I've implemented models for hundreds of research papers for free, with no reward other than the endless verbal harassment from the elite and their rulers."
In his self-narration, we can see that as a young person from a "small town" background, although Kye Gomez has considerable talent, he has had to carve out his own place in the elite-dominated AI field through his own talent for a long time.
This may explain why Swarms has been deeply cultivating in Web2 for a long time, but has recently turned to Web3. Web3 can better enable him to "monetize his talent". The facts have proven that his choice is correct, as Swarms has broken out and its current market value has reached $300 million.
In media reports, Kye Gomez started learning programming from the age of 10 and applied his new programming knowledge to games, which also led Gomez to eventually understand artificial intelligence. Gomez once told the media that at the age of 13, he created his first artificial intelligence model to crack 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 Kye Gomez questioned OpenAI's new product as 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, everything comes from our codebase."
While Kye Gomez publicly questioned OpenAI's plagiarism, it did not trigger public support for him. Netizens dug up his previous history of fraud, and said that based on the README documents published on Github by both sides, OpenAI's version seems more credible. The general public opinion tends to believe that Kye Gomez is falsely accusing plagiarism and has a tendency of fraud. Regarding Kye Gomez's plagiarism allegations, OpenAI has not responded.
The Entanglement of Swarms and AI16Z
Faced with 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 with Shaw's remarks, and more of them are telling 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 discussion 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 focused 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 between multiple AI Agents. To explain it more simply, the difference for developers is that Eliza is a development framework for an AI Agent, and developers can quickly build an AI Agent project according to this framework. While Swarms provides some tools for developers, 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 aimed at 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 of Swarms that is full of imagination.
