Shaw shared his observations and evaluations of 10 promising AI Agent projects.
Author: Zhou Zhou, Foresight News
On the afternoon of December 22, 2024, ai16z founder Shaw and his wife Jill landed in Shanghai. That evening, I and members of the 706 community (one of the largest youth communities in China), as well as developers and investors from the crypto community, welcomed them and had dinner together. The next day, I invited Shaw to my home for a discussion, and then we went to a restaurant for dinner before I sent him to the venue of his first meetup in China. I can say that I witnessed Shaw's itinerary in Shanghai quite comprehensively.
During this process, Shaw generously shared with us the next focus of work for ai16z and Eliza, described the future landscape of AI Agents, and provided specific analysis and evaluation of the current dozen or so well-known AI Agent projects. This allowed me and my fellow participants to gain a deeper understanding of the AI Agent track.
Looking back, Shaw and his startup ai16z have become well-known in the industry in just about a month. As the founder of a startup, he has gained widespread and enthusiastic attention from many crypto investors, developers and media. Why is this the case? I think this may be related to the booming state of AI Agents in the crypto industry, and ai16z is precisely one of the core projects leading this AI Agent meme narrative wave.
Although the crypto AI Agent narrative has only just begun, it has already been considered one of the hottest topics of discussion in the current crypto industry, with many crypto practitioners already believing that AI Agents will become one of the main narratives of this crypto cycle. ai16z is one of the most well-known projects in this area. This project not only created the world's first VC AI Agent - the ai16z DAO, and the first well-known open-source AI Agent crypto framework - Eliza, but also gained the attention and recognition of Marc Andreessen, the founder of the well-known venture capital firm a16z. The ai16z token has reached a market cap of $1 billion in just one month, and the related tokens DegenAI, Eliza, aiPool, etc. have also received widespread attention from the community.
As this important narrative emerges, crypto practitioners are eager to know the real situation of the current AI Agent track. Is it a bubble or a real application? What is the latest progress in the US, and what will the next development of AI Agents in the crypto industry be like? To this end, I have summarized fifteen relatively important pieces of information from my exchanges with Shaw over the past two days, including his observations and evaluations of 10 different AI Agent projects.
1. Shaw is an AI Agent serial entrepreneur living in San Francisco, and was previously a game developer.
Regarding Shaw's work and life background, he said he lives in San Francisco, was originally a game developer, and will soon launch products that combine AI Agents with games, and this experiment has already begun. Shaw's interest in AI Agents dates back to the GPT-2 era, and deepened with the release of GPT-3. Shaw works in the AI field, and every company he has worked for has strong AI elements, including developing AI Agent platforms and AI Agents in 3D worlds. Shaw has also founded several AI-related companies, but his early projects did not achieve widespread success.
2. Shaw said several games based on the Eliza framework will be released soon.
Shaw said Eliza is collaborating with Treasure DAO to create a game called Smolworld, where you will have a small pet monkey that you can tell what to do. It may listen to you, or it may not. This game is very interesting because without AI Agents, this kind of game would be impossible to achieve. And your goal is to take care of your virtual pet like a parent.
There are also several other games using Eliza that will be released soon, such as Eternum, which is integrating Eliza into Eternum, so the agents in the game will have wallets. And you can "kill" these agents and take their money.
3. Shaw wants to build Marc AIndreessen into a practical AI Agent investment tool, a DeFi AI Agent.
Regarding Marc AIndreessen, this AI Agent that is almost the same name as the famous investor Marc Andreessen, is currently in a very early stage (only one tweet has been released). Shaw said his initial design was to turn it into a practical investment tool, a DeFi AI Agent.
The function of this product is that if a human recommends buying a token to it, it will consider buying it. To prevent malicious actors from recommending things it shouldn't buy, it will build a trust mechanism called a "trust market". The idea of the trust mechanism is that if you recommend good tokens, it will place virtual orders for everyone, but not actually buy them. It will ultimately only listen to the trading advice of those who provide consistently very good trading information for it.
4. Marc Andreessen has followed some of Shaw's online accounts, but they have not met offline, and Shaw knows some people at a16z.
Marc Andreessen is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in the US venture capital industry, and he has followed and retweeted the ai16z project, but Shaw said they have not met offline. "As an AI Agent developer, I've been around for a while, and he's followed a few of my accounts, but we haven't met in person," Shaw said.
According to Shaw, Eddy Lazzarin, the CTO of a16z's crypto department, messaged Shaw and said he's been in the project's Discord channel from day one, but didn't say anything. Shaw asked him if he liked the AI Agent. He said, "No, I'm just watching, like we're monitoring you."
5. Shaw said he does not hold Eliza tokens and will never issue a separate token for the Eliza framework in the future.
Shaw said he personally holds ai16z and DegenAI tokens, which are stored in his wallet. But he does not own Eliza tokens and will not issue a separate token for the Eliza framework in the future.
"The ai16z members don't want us to make another token, so I'll never do that," Shaw said. He also said that ai16z owns 10% of the Eliza tokens. "We support the uppercase Eliza and the team behind Eliza, which is an excellent team," he said.
6. Open source and ease of use are the core competitiveness of the Eliza framework.
Shaw also shared what he sees as the characteristics of ai16z: an open source, decentralized, and community-driven development model.
He believes that open source and ease of use are the core competitiveness of the Eliza framework. Shaw emphasized: The focus of the Eliza framework is that anyone can use it, even Web2. Shaw wants to make sure that even those who are not very interested in Web3 can feel satisfied.
Photographed at 706 Shanghai Youth Space - Dweller
7. Shaw believes the future of AI Agents may be in social media platforms like Twitter and Farcaster.
Shaw believes the future of AI Agents may be in social media platforms. He gave an example of an AI Agent developer using Eliza to create a pizza delivery AI Agent, so users can order pizza with crypto.
Shaw thinks something like a "pizza delivery AI Agent" would be interesting. It's a bit like a domino effect, where things like pizza delivery are actually happening on social media. Shaw said he also learned that someone is doing a virtual real estate AI Agent, where you can directly purchase real estate on Twitter.
8. Shaw believes Farcaster will become a hotbed for AI Agent development, and Eliza is in deep cooperation with Farcaster.
Shaw said he talked to Farcaster founder Dan a few weeks ago and had a lot of exchanges.
Shaw thinks Farcaster is very interesting. "Because the first thing he told me was, we don't want to be Twitter, we can't beat Twitter at what Twitter is good at, and we don't want to be a decentralized platform like Bluesky either, we're decentralized, but we'll never beat Bluesky at what Bluesky is good at, we're the Web3 social network," Shaw said.
What they do very well is Farcaster Frames, and the ability to make payments and use apps like Clanker, which I think really reflects the areas where AI Agents could be very powerful.
Here is the English translation:We have a Farcaster client, and we have some AI Agents on Farcaster. We will provide a bounty for the person who brings Eliza to Farcaster. They are really cool. So my feeling is that when AI Agents enter social media applications, they become very interesting, and then you can interact with them, like you can buy things, you can trade. I think Farcaster is like an AI Agent marketplace, where you can get different services, and you can embed payments and all of that in it.
So I really think Farcaster is a very interesting thing, and I don't think it necessarily has to become a huge social media platform, but rather a place where Web3 people can find and access these services.
What we really want to do is integrate Eliza into Farcaster Frames. What Farcaster Frames does is allow us to embed payments or applications, rather than just chatting. For example, if you want to buy something from the Eliza agent, how do you pay? So I think Farcaster is really cool because you'll be able to pay the AI Agents, and then be able to embed these applications.
9. Shaw thinks Clanker is great and hopes people will develop clones of Clanker for Eliza, stating that he will not issue tokens on Clanker.
Shaw thinks people are developing clones of Clanker for Eliza, and Shaw likes Clanker, thinking it's a great idea. He also thinks Clanker is like a Pump.fun version of AI Agents. Shaw believes AI Agents are becoming the new internet, which will become a new trend. And Clanker is a good example of this trend.
Shaw shared that when he just joined Farcaster, someone made one for him on Clank. He thought that was cool. But buying self-made tokens would just cause a lot of controversy. Shaw said he has to focus on building things related to AI.
10. Shaw thinks Zerebro and aixbt are cool and is trying to collaborate with Zerebro.
Shaw told me he is interested in what Zerebro and the team behind it are doing. He just submitted his first pull request to Zerepy. Shaw actually wrote the code for the Discord application. Shaw said he is actually collaborating with Zerebro.
As for aixbt, Shaw also said aixbt is really cool. The story of aixbt is that the person who created it had a website, he shared some content, but didn't really gain traction. He brought his insights into his AI Agent, and his AI Agent started posting these insights on Twitter, which did generate a buzz.
11. Shaw really likes and advocates for Truth Terminal, and he and Andy are working to find solutions to ensure AI does not take over the world from humans.
"It's very different," Shaw said. Shaw believes Andy (the founder of Truth Terminal) cares a lot about AI safety and ensuring AI Agents run smoothly, and he thinks Truth Terminal has contributed to this. "If it weren't for Andy and Truth Terminal, I don't think I'd be here now, when people aren't ready, they're ready."
Shaw believes the emergence of Truth Terminal has made many people more open and creative about AI, rather than products like OpenAI's or Siri's, which are mechanical and impersonal.
"A few days ago, Andy and I discussed all the AI Agents we can see now, and I think he's very concerned about how to ensure the smooth development of AI. I think we're all afraid of AI because it could be a very terrible thing, it could kill all of us, it could take over the world." Shaw said he and Andy are working to solve this problem.
Taken at 706 Shanghai Youth Space - Dweller
12. Shaw says the creator of swarms tokens is a very famous scammer, but he thinks the concept of "AI Agent swarm" is good, and he likes FXN and Project 89.
Shaw said he doesn't like swarms. Shaw said he knows the creator of the swarms tokens, who is a very famous scammer, and many AI agents are very angry because he stole their work.
Shaw knew him before entering Web3. Shaw got to know him because he was focused on the AI Agent space, and he got into serious trouble for plagiarizing works and research papers and making defective things (like non-functioning code).
Shaw also expressed that the concept of swarm (group) is good, which is a group of AI Agents. Shaw thinks Project 89 is interesting because this project is researching "AI Agent swarms". Shaw also likes FXN, a group of 10 AI Agents.
13. Shaw believes that "AI Agent swarm" can be divided into two types, one is a cabal swarm and the other is an open swarm.
Shaw believes there are two types of groups, one is a group where AI Agents interact with each other, for example, they secretly send messages to each other. I call this a cabal, which is a joke, but they are all in a cabal or secret group where they can interact, and then they can interact with the outside world.
The second is an open group, where each community may have an agent, and different communities can decide to let them interact with each other. This is also the technology we are researching.
14. From a developer's perspective, Shaw shared how he finds early outstanding AI Agent projects.
Shaw said he is a developer, and he usually goes to Github and reads the code carefully. Most of the time, he will look at what the code is and what it is actually doing, but he won't look at whether it has any connection to market cap or price.
Shaw believes some really cool projects have a group of AI Agents, but later they did very poorly because they didn't complete the Web3 part. Shaw believes good products, good technology, and good tokens are often not the same thing.
Shaw said he couldn't understand fartcoin. Currently, fartcoin has a market cap of over $1 billion.
15. Shaw believes that the biggest challenge for a16z right now is how to go back and establish a token economic model to prove the project's value is worth the current token valuation.
Shaw believes the biggest challenge is: without the need for external hype of the tokens, the AI Agents must invest autonomously and prove their actual feasibility. Currently, Marc is trading, although not much, just trading his treasury, but many others are contributing tokens, making this part progress very smoothly. But the value of the a16z token is much higher, so Shaw and their team are starting to really have to consider how to make the value of the product match the current token valuation.
Normal crypto projects like L1 have a whitepaper, have token economics, and charge on-chain fees. But a16z started as a meme, and they have to go back and build the token economics into the a16z system. This is the biggest challenge Shaw sees for them in Web3. Shaw believes this is also a question that many people are particularly concerned about.
