I believe that many people have already been confused by the continuous market downturn, to the extent that the originally vibrant AI Agent's new narrative has also been shrouded in gloom. A thousand words boil down to one question: has the new narrative of the AI Agent been declared Over? To be honest, I don't know if the coin price has hit bottom, but the narrative evolution of the AI Agent is still on a clear path.
1) I won't say many comforting words, as we are all the same - those who have been holding on to the hope and confidence in the AI Agent are suffering from the continuous shrinkage of their positions.
The core reason is that although the primary market has built a clear "value investment and research" direction in terms of chasing AI infra, framework standards, and applications, the secondary market has become too MEME-ized, and the team also appears to be a bit of a mess, so the risk profile in the overall AI Agent market is still far greater than the opportunities.
So when faced with uncertain macroeconomic conditions and unclear BTC direction, the AI Agent track, as a new and emerging on-chain track, naturally becomes one of the first objects of capital risk aversion, which makes the already illiquid track even more incapable of withstanding major market fluctuations, resulting in a halving or even near-zero situation. But don't forget that perhaps precisely because of this, once the overall market environment stabilizes, the opportunities will arise again, and the AI Agent track will likely be among the first to take off.
2) Various signs indicate that the momentum of the new narrative of the AI Agent has just begun to emerge and will not be abandoned. On the one hand, the growing force of AI startups spilling over from web2 is becoming more and more aware of the potential opportunities in the web3 field, and more excellent teams and projects will flow into web3 to explore new possibilities. On the other hand, the majority of web3 projects trapped in difficulties will cling to the new narrative of the AI Agent and try to break new ground, with many well-known VCs and web3 mainstream teams planning to incubate new projects.
In short, the AI Agent represents the hope of the entire village, and its momentum has just begun to explode, lacking the fundamental basis to declare a halt and an end. Especially with the collective entry of some VCs and mature project teams, the current chaos caused by overly messy teams will be reshuffled, further raising the technical threshold (standardization) and the degree of involution in the industry. For retail investors, this means that the stability and maturity of the track will also be improved.
3) The two major AI Agent camps of #ai16z and #Virtual have both exposed their own problems during this turbulence, including the chaos in resource integration for ai16z and the uncertainty in the development momentum of Virtual's closed-source ecosystem. After this major upheaval, it is a good thing to be able to detach from the Fomo state and return to calmness. Any excessive mythologization of any force is not conducive to the subsequent greater momentum explosion.
After all, as a major commercial IP, ai16z is like a spiritual totem, and it is the open-source innovation and community vitality that represent its true future, regardless of the personal cultivation of those who spread FUD about it @shawmakesmagic, as long as the developer community continues to revolve around the ElizaOS framework, the future of ai16z is incalculable.
The drawback of Virtual's closed-source ecosystem lies in the positive/negative spiral characteristics of its Tokenomics, which are very prominent in both the rising and falling markets, but this is a reflection of its speculative attributes being greater than its application value. I am more concerned about how the closed-source model of Virtual can create more high-quality single-agent AI applications like @aixbt_agent.
4) The AI Agent has rushed through a round of directions in the past three months, including AI MEME, AI single-agent applications, AI frameworks and standards, AI chain engineering, AI metaverse, and DeFai. This speed of evolution is actually very dangerous. Using the framework and standards as an example, no matter how grandiose the rhetoric, it cannot change the suspicion of "making a pie in the sky". Now the track is still in the stage of using single-agent AI to change user Mindshare, without a rich application market, just internal involution of frameworks and standards, which is meaningless.
Fundamentally, it is due to the market's confusion in the value evaluation system of the new directions of the AI Agent. Many people believe that the more ethereal the concepts and directions such as framework standards and metaverse appear to be, the higher they can be valued, which is not the case.
The development foundation of the AI Agent track is "application-first". Any concept and direction that cannot be established on the basis of applications will be futile. If it is found to be a mess after a round of hasty speculation, then there is no doubt that single-agent AI applications will be the focus of the next stage of competition, and multi-modal interaction, AI metaverse, and DeFai can all be speculated, but please first bring out the Agent to take a walk.
5) The overall trend of "chain-based" AI Agent will still exist, but it is time for stage-wise engineering delivery. The current ElizaOS framework only has some practical primary-level solutions in directions such as Memory and Character, and the difficulties to be overcome in incorporating the decentralized idea of chain-based will be many.
For example, in terms of DA capabilities, traditional layer2 has achieved limited DA expansion through off-chain zk Proof proof and on-chain distributed verification, but how to ZK-ize the dynamic Prompt input and output of LLMs large models, and how to verify data availability in the long term, are all major engineering challenges. Another example is Oracle capabilities - it seems simple to feed on-chain + off-chain data to the AI Agent, but how to balance real-time and computational overhead, the complexity of on-chain data and the credibility of off-chain data, are all major challenges.
So I still firmly believe that "chain-based" will be the main theme of the next evolution of the AI Agent, but the key is how to deliver some truly valuable, scalable and verifiable solutions. Simply applying the old chain narrative to the AI Agent cannot be said to be impossible, but there are still many details of engineering implementation to be refined.
In summary, although it is most likely that the AI Agent direction will still be dominated by "chaos" in the future, the AI Agent is a new direction to redeem the old narrative, which means that the market will be extremely demanding and harsh in scrutinizing its every evolutionary trend.
Like some attempts to bring VC-backed high FDV tokens into the AI Agent field, like the AICC that is full of elite predatory, and like some Li Kui parties who just see web3 as a financing channel. I advise you, the AI Agent is ultimately the path of grassroots counterattack, succeeding or failing with the community, and projects that bind the interests of the community cannot go far.
