At the beginning of the new year, the two flagship projects of the AI Agent track, a16z and Swarms, have both hit new highs in market capitalization.
This should be a joyous occasion for all, but a16z founder Shaw has dealt a heavy blow to Swarms, publicly criticizing Swarms developer Kye Gomez, directly stating that he "does not know how to write code and has a history of fraud", and targeting his "character issues". Kye had previously gained attention for being a 19-year-old high school dropout, and was praised as a "child prodigy".
This dispute has also caused the two major projects to plummet by more than 20% in the short term, but they have regained their footing in just one day, with Swarms even setting a new high of $0.6.
This event has once again placed the complex relationships, including love and hate, among the developers behind the AI Agent under the spotlight. Odaily will briefly sort out the recent representative relationships between the developers behind the AI Agent in this article, and observe the impact of the Devs on the AI Agent and related meme coin price trends from the side.
The central node of the relationship map: a16z founder Shaw
According to Coingecko data, as of the time of writing, the current price of a16z is $2.17, with a 7-day increase of 70%, and a market capitalization of $2.4 billion, second only to the leading AI Agent token VIRTUAL in the Base ecosystem and the veteran AI concept token FET, ranking third in the AI Agent sector.
Such a dazzling performance has naturally brought Shaw, the developer behind it, a huge amount of attention. In particular, Shaw has been frequently holding offline roadshows recently, closely communicating with community members in different regions, and his public statements are seen as "one of the important signals in the AI Agent field". The Space online conference previously strongly promoted by Shaw to conduct AI Agent development education is also seen as a "preaching of the deep integration of AI x Crypto".
Frequent active speaking has brought Shaw a lot of supporters, but it has also become a trigger for conflicts with other project developers.
Shaw VS Kye: Undisguised mutual dislike
Shaw has also previously criticized Swarms developer Kye. On December 21, 2024, he wrote: "I really don't like to publicly point out other people's problems. Doing so poses a huge risk to our project, making many people feel anxious, and I don't want to discourage hard-working developers either. But some people will steal the fruits of others' labor and try to take credit for themselves."
Shaw posted a post published on the Reddit machine learning forum in August 2023, which pointed out that a Github repo might have traces of stealing others' achievements, and that repo belonged to Swarms developer Kye. The comments also pointed out that Kye had directly copied and pasted the code from a certain code library. "Based on his code commit frequency and code content, Kye is most likely generating code through ChatGPT."
And in this latest criticism of Kye, Shaw's intensity is far beyond previous occasions.
After Shaw's critical tweet was posted, the official X platform account of the Swarms project, an AI Agent, replied: "Can you point out where the code is problematic so that we can fix it?"
Shaw was also uncompromising, directly retorting: "You are a thief and a fraud, and people from Princeton University and senior members of OpenAI like Gwern have evidence." The links and screenshots were explanations that Kye's previous code was alleged to have been generated by ChatGPT.
Faced with Shaw's questioning, Swarms developer Kye changed his previous confrontational attitude and chose a friendly response. "If you have any questions about Swarms, please submit feedback and we will fix the problem immediately. We are committed to providing a seamless AI Agent building experience for everyone."
On December 22 last year, when Shaw first criticized Kye, the latter's reaction was very intense. Kye believed that Shaw's selling of tokens had damaged the project, causing many investors to lose money, while he himself had continued to hold Swarms and mcs and never sold, and he was the "orthodox" one who was committed to realizing the functionality and practicality of the AI Agent. After Shaw blocked his account, Kye mocked him in posts and launched "identity attacks", believing that Shaw, Eliza and ai16z and other related people and projects were all scams.
Shaw & a16z crypto CTO: "DM friends"
As the initiator of the a16z DAO organization fund, Shaw's contact with a16z is not much, and the only a16z personnel he has direct contact with is the a16z Crypto CTO. Previously, Shaw himself had also posted an explanation saying that a16z and ai16z have no relationship at all, and emphasized that buying related concept tokens is very stupid. However, his supplementary comment in the comments that "I'm also one of the fools" has further misled uninformed users into misunderstanding the relationship between the two and buying ai16z-related tokens.
Last November, a16z Crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin posted on X revealing the ongoing dialogue between the venture capital firm and the ai16z DAO. Previously, ai16z co-founder Shaw had posted on X seeking contact with a16z, and Lazzarin replied, "Check your DM". At that time, ai16z was affected by this news, with a 24-hour increase of nearly 44% and a market capitalization of over $480 million.
Shaw & Baoskee: A friendly symbiotic relationship between the platform and the project
As a "VC-free investment platform", one of the great achievements of daos.fun is the community-owned fund ai16z, so the relationship between Shaw and Baoskee, the founder of the ai16z launch platform daos.fun, can be described as very friendly.
Previously, Baoskee had made a positive response to the "ai16z token permissions" issue, directly standing up for ai16z and Shaw himself: "The ai16z token is indeed mintable, and the minting power will be controlled by the DAO token holders (with veto power protection)... We will conduct a thorough audit on this."
In a sense, the two can be considered as symbiotic, both on the same rope.
Shaw & Lucid: Co-founding partners of ai16z
Another partner of the ai16z DAO, Lucid, is Shaw's "right-hand man", who participated in the creation of ai16z together, and has also initiated the creation of the Base ecosystem AI Agent BeffAI.
Previously, Shaw had posted looking for developers interested in the Eliza Runescape plugin and proxy development, and the contact person for that project was Lucid.
Shaw & Skely: Supporter and initiator of the ai Pool project
Skely, the initiator of the AI Agent project ai Pool (METAV) that raised over 30,000 SOL in just a few hours, is a developer that Shaw cites as an example.
When Skely's X platform account was maliciously reported and banned, Shaw, as the founder of a16z, was the first to repost the community member's message in support, and later posted that the aiPool token had been released and Skely was still working to restore the X account, expressing his support for the former without reservation.
Shaw & KOTO 9 X: One-sided admiration
KOTOX 9, who had previously issued the AI meme coin KOTO, was suspected by some to be the target of Shaw's initial criticism (which was actually referring to Swarms developer Kye), but Shaw later responded to clarify: "It's not him, KOTO 9 X is a very good developer." His words are full of admiration.
Shaw & Dan Romero: Promoters of the Farcaster Ecosystem
In December last year, Shaw wrote: "Farcaster is the future of programmatic applications. Eliza has already integrated Farcaster. And it has donated $420 worth of degenai tokens to each Eliza framework developer who has embedded an AI Agent into the Farcaster ecosystem on their own behalf."
This move naturally received strong support from Dan Romero, the co-founder of the Farcaster ecosystem, who replied in the comments with "LFG".
This suggests that the two parties have a kind of partnership relationship to some extent.
In addition, Shaw has also actively promoted close cooperation between ai16z, Eliza and the decentralized computing power network Aethir, the decentralized AI operating system 0G, and the well-known DEX platform Orca.
Other Smolworld Developers: Shaw's Team Partners
In a tweet at the end of last year, when asked in surprise whether he was no longer involved in Smolworld-related work and was instead focusing on Eliza and ai16z, Shaw also responded: "I'm still managing the team, but the daily development work is mainly handled by lordasado, Koshi and Alextitonis."
Summary: AI Agents Have No Borders, But Developers Do
As the old saying goes: "Science has no borders, but scientists have different nationalities." Similarly, project accounts built on the X platform, smart contracts deployed on the chain, and their corresponding AI Agents have no borders, but the countless AI Agents behind them may have different borders and complex relationships.
Although the AI Agents in the crypto field still have a lot of room for progress compared to mainstream products, the AI Agents and their developers are still working in their own way to promote the continuous development of projects, products and tracks. As Kye, the developer of Swarms, said, "Fighting is a zero-sum game where both sides lose, only by working together can we create a net gain."
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