Author: YBB Capital Researcher Zeke
Introduction: If code is law, what about AI?
In recent articles, I have mentioned two problems that have long troubled me. One is the "centralized decision-making" problem of projects, which still seems almost unsolvable. For example, the typical cases I have mentioned many times, Uni and Ethereum, the former has become 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 charging and Uni Chain without any proposal discussion, 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 even Web3 development, 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, we have all experienced firsthand.
The other problem is the "BAT-ization" of the head, taking 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 also led by Cb's leadership, Base naturally has the advantage of downward strike competition against general public chains. Although from the user's perspective, Base has the effect of making people rich, a better user experience, and 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 blockchain space be controlled by giants like the current Internet? Will users become "lambs", and will small projects with creativity and community culture 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 talk about the origin of AI Meme first. 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 human beings, GOAT is a product born from the unpredictable output of the dual Claude 3 Opus AI model. The so-called unpredictable output means that under 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 strange and reclusive, often making some wonderful statements around the "Goatse" meme, the gist of which is 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, the creator of Truth Terminal, Andy Ayrey, has also introduced it into Discord servers to 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, where Andy gave it access to Twitter, allowing it to read, reply 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 $50,000 worth of Bitcoin funding. After 9 months of development, an anonymous person finally launched the token GOAT for it, and due to the extremely 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 dialoguing and joking to create Meme under human guidance, but if you expand it to other aspects, its potential as an opinion leader and creator has already shown its sharp edge. 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 that 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 recently announced by Microsoft well corresponds to this speech, and 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 agent and sales order agent, to help determine the priority of potential customers and automatically process orders; operations, such as supplier communication agent and financial reconciliation agent, to optimize supply chain management and financial processes; service, such as customer intent agent and customer knowledge management agent, to improve customer service experience through automated case management and knowledge base updates. In addition, there are other agents: financial adjustment agent for preparing and cleaning financial report data; account reconciliation agent for automatic transaction matching and clearing; time and expense agent responsible for time entry, expense tracking and approval workflows.
AI agents can perform a series of tasks without supervision, acting as virtual employees. This technological progress can be seen as a progression of AI based on large language models from a simple chat interface to a more seamless integration into the work environment.
Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft's AI projects, 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 functional areas to execute and coordinate business processes."
The primary feature of AI agents is autonomy, followed by decision-making ability. From the voice assistants in our phones to smart home devices based on the environment, these are all AI agents based on simple reflexes, with simple decision-making ability and relatively strong autonomy. The AI agents we are discussing now are mainly those with large language models as their brains. The current Truth Terminal does not yet have sufficient autonomy and decision-making ability, but we will soon see AI agents enter the practical domain. In the examples of customer trials presented at the Microsoft event, we have already seen AI agents participating in credit approval at HSBC, creative briefings at Unilever, and M&A processes at law firms. AI agents will become multi-dynamic participants. Regarding the situation mentioned at the beginning, can AI agents trained with different blockchain histories, media platforms, and community cultures provide more fair and healthy development proposals, and ultimately strike a better balance between community and project interests? And in the face of the downward attack of tech giants, can we bring the starting line closer through the multi-level collaboration of AI?
From the shock of GPT-3 intelligence to the disappearance of Sora, in the official AI agent tools released 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 aligned Web3 and Silicon Valley giants 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's CEO had envisioned, and its blockchain division was decomposed into the twin stars we see today, 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" to play multiple roles, in an attempt to simulate the various hierarchical institutions of human society in the real world. Although this concept has long existed, this wave of enthusiasm will likely eventually return to the metaverse concept through such AI gameplay.
Reigniting the fire at this juncture may not be a bad choice. From the development trajectory of Meta itself, Mark Zuckerberg has not really given up on the idea of the metaverse, he has just moved from frequently making empty promises to directly shoving the cake into your mouth. As for Meta's AI layout, I don't need to say much, the real bottleneck in the past was mainly that users could not enter the metaverse to experience it. But the Quest series has reached the level of affordable AR headsets, and the first AR glasses Orion have demonstrated an extremely lightweight standard, weighing only 98g and able to achieve virtual reality interaction with a myoelectric bracelet, although the price is high, at least it proves that lightweight is possible. What is currently lacking is more energy constraints and a killer application. As for the power problem, I can't make too much comment. 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 applications emerge in this space, ultimately colliding with a killer application. If the AI agents launched by Microsoft perform 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, tech giants like Apple and Microsoft are also developing AR glasses in sync, and over time, the metaverse may see its "Ready Player One" moment in the coming years.
IV. Letting 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 many projects have started to shift their development towards the chain abstraction track, but their performance has not been entirely satisfactory. How to achieve cross-chain, cross-dApp, accurate intent, and secure process is a very complex problem. Not to mention cross-chain is a century-old problem, the latter two, I will use the Web3 primitives here and call them Solvers. 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 instance, "I want to order a 30-yuan hamburger takeout" is an "intent", to fulfill 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 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, where I tell the AI that I need to order a meal without doing any clicking, and the AI agent responds that I ate something a bit greasy yesterday, so would I like to have some congee today? I only need to respond that I'll have my usual, and this is a manifestation 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 believe it is more secure compared to ordinary multi-signature projects), combined with the wallet account, we can directly skip the most cumbersome cross-chain process, and instead verify the accuracy of the AI steps, wouldn't that be simpler? 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 my 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 shift from community building, consensus formation, and time accumulation, to being led by creativity.
