15 important pieces of AI Agent information revealed by the founder of ai16z

Author: Zhou Zhou, Foresight News

On the afternoon of December 22, 2024, ai16z founder Shaw and his wife Jill landed in Shanghai. On the night of landing, I worked with members of the 706 community (one of the largest youth communities in China), as well as developers and investors from the crypto community. He took a shower and had dinner together. The next day, I invited Shaw to come to my home for communication, and we went to the restaurant to have dinner together, and then sent Shaw to the venue of his first meetup in China. It can be said that it was a relatively complete witness to Shaw's trip in Shanghai.

During this process, Shaw generously shared with us the next steps of ai16z and Eliza's work, described the future of AI Agent, and conducted detailed analysis and evaluation of more than a dozen well-known AI Agent projects. It gave me and my friends who attended the party a deeper understanding of the AI ​​Agent track.

Looking back, Shaw and ai16z, which he founded, have only been famous in the industry for about a month. As the founder of a start-up project, they have received extensive and eager attention from many investors, developers and media in the encryption industry. Why is this happening? I think this may be related to the popularity of AI Agent in the encryption industry, and ai16z is one of the core projects leading this wave of AI Agent meme narratives.

Although the narrative of encrypted AI Agent has only started a month ago, it is already considered to be the most hotly discussed topic in the current encryption industry. Many encryption practitioners have determined that AI Agent will become one of the main narratives of this encryption cycle. ai16z is the most well-known project among them. This project not only created the world's first VC AI Agent-ai16z DAO, the first well-known open source AI Agent encryption framework-Eliza, but also obtained the well-known American venture capital a16z The attention and recognition of founder Marc Andreessen. As a result, ai16z's token reached a market value of US$1 billion within a month, and related tokens DegenAI, Eliza, aiPool, etc. have also received widespread attention from the community.

When this important narrative was born, encryption practitioners were eager to know the true situation of the current AI Agent track. Is it a bubble or a real application? What are the latest developments in the United States, and what will be the next step for AI Agents in the crypto industry? To this end, I summarized fifteen pieces of more important 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 a serial AI Agent entrepreneur living in San Francisco and a former game developer.

Regarding Shaw's work and life background, Shaw said that he lives in San Francisco and started as a game developer. He will next launch products that combine AI Agents with games. This experiment has already begun. Shaw's focus on AI Agents began in the GPT-2 era, and he has further studied AI Agents with the release of GPT-3. Shaw works in the field of AI, and every company he works for has strong AI elements, including the development of AI Agent platforms and AI Agents in the 3D world. Shaw has also founded several AI-related companies, but the early projects were not widely successful.

2. Shaw said that several games based on the Eliza framework are about to be launched.

Shaw said Eliza is working with Treasure DAO to make a game called Smolworld, where you have a little pet monkey that you tell it what to do. Maybe it will listen to you, maybe it won't. This game is interesting because it would not be possible without AI Agents. And your goal is to take care of your virtual pet like a parent.

There are also several games using Eliza coming soon, such as Eternum, which is integrating Eliza into Eternum so that 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 and a DeFi AI Agent.

Regarding Marc AIndreessen, the AI ​​Agent that has almost the same name as the well-known investor Marc Andreessen, the project is still in a very early stage (only one tweet has been posted). Shaw said that his original intention of designing it was to build it into a practical investment tool, a DeFi AI Agent.

The function of this product is that if a human recommends it to buy a token, it will consider buying it. In order to prevent malicious actors from recommending things that it should not buy, it will build a trust mechanism called a "trust market." The idea of ​​the trust mechanism is that if you recommend a good token, it will place a virtual order for everyone, but not a real purchase. It ends up only taking trading advice from those who provide him with consistently very good trading information.

4. Marc Andreessen follows several of Shaw’s online accounts, but they have never met offline. Shaw knows some people from a16z.

Marc Andreessen is undoubtedly one of the most influential people in the American venture capital community. He has followed and retweeted the ai16z project, but Shaw said they have never met offline. "I have been an AI Agent developer for a while, and he has followed a few of my accounts, but we have never met in person," Shaw said.

According to Shaw: Eddy Lazzarin, CTO of a16z’s cryptocurrency department, sent a message to Shaw saying that he had been in the project’s Discord channel from day one, but said nothing. Shaw asked him if he liked the AI ​​Agent. He said, no, I'm just there watching, like we're watching you.

5. Shaw stated that he does not hold Eliza tokens and will never issue independent tokens for the Eliza framework in the future.

Shaw said he personally holds both ai16z and DegenAI tokens and keeps them in his wallet. However, it does not own Eliza tokens and will not issue independent tokens for the Eliza framework.

"The ai16z members don't want us to make another token, so I will never do it," Shaw said. At the same time, he also said that ai16z owns 10% of Eliza tokens. We support Capital Eliza and the team behind Eliza, who says it's a very good team.

6. Open source and ease of use are the core competitiveness of the Eliza framework.

Shaw also shared the characteristics of ai16z in his mind: open source, decentralization 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 whole point of the Eliza framework is that anyone can use it, even Web2. Shaw wants to make sure that even those who don't pay much attention to Web3 are satisfied.

Taken at 706 Shanghai Youth Space——Dweller

7. Shaw believes that the future of AI Agents may lie in social media platforms such as Twitter and Farcaster.

Shaw believes that the future of AI Agents may lie in social media platforms. He gave an example of an AI Agent developer using Eliza to create a pizza delivery AI Agent so that users can order pizza with cryptocurrency.

Shaw thought it would be interesting to have something like a “pizza delivery AI agent.” It's kind of like a domino experience, like pizza delivery, that's actually all on social media. Shaw said he also learned that someone is working on a virtual real estate AI Agent that allows you to buy real estate directly on Twitter.

8. Shaw believes that Farcaster will become a hot spot for the development of AI Agents, and Eliza is conducting in-depth cooperation with Farcaster.

Shaw said he spoke with Dan, the founder of Farcaster, 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 in what Twitter is good at, and we don’t want to be a decentralized platform like Bluesky, we are decentralized, but we You can never beat Bluesky at what it does best, we are the social network for Web3," said Shaw.

Something they've done really well is Farcaster Frames, and the ability to make payments and use apps like Clanker, which I think really reflects an area where AI Agents can be very powerful.

We have a Farcaster client, and we have some AI Agents on Farcaster. A reward will be offered to the person who brings Eliza to Farcaster. They're really cool. So my feeling is that when AI agents come into social media applications, they become very interesting and then you can interact with them, like you can buy things, you can trade. Farcaster, I think of it, is like an AI Agent marketplace where you can get different services and you can embed payments and all these things.

So I really think Farcaster is a really interesting thing, and I think it doesn't necessarily have to be a huge social media platform, but it's 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 apps instead of just chatting. For example, if you want to buy something from Eliza Agent, how do you pay? So I think Farcaster is really cool because you'll be able to pay AI Agents and then be able to embed these applications.

9. Shaw thinks Clanker is great and hopes people will develop a clone version of Clanker in Eliza. He said he will not issue coins on Clanker.

Shaw thought people were developing a clone of Clanker for Eliza, and Shaw liked Clanker and thought it was a great idea. And I think Clanker is like the Pump.fun version of AI Agent. Shaw believes that AI Agent is becoming a new network and this will become a new trend. And Clanker is a great example of this trend.

Shaw shared that when he first joined Farcaster, someone made one for him on Clank. He thought that was cool. But when buying a token that you make yourself, it just creates a lot of controversy. Shaw said he has to focus on building stuff about AI.

10. Shaw thinks Zerebro and aixbt are cool and is trying to cooperate with Zerebro.

Shaw told me he's interested in what Zerebro and the team behind it are doing. He just submitted the first pull request to Zerepy. Shaw actually wrote the code for the Discord app. Shaw said it is actually working with Zerebro.

And for aixbt, Shaw also said that aixbt is really cool, and the story of aixbt is that the person who created it had a website and he shared some content, but it didn't really gain traction. He brought his insights into his AI Agent, and his AI Agent started tweeting about those insights, and it really caused a stir.

11. Shaw likes and admires Truth Terminal very much. He and Andy are working hard to find solutions where AI will not replace humans in running the world.

"It's very different," Shaw said. Shaw believes that Andy (the founder of Truth Terminal) is very concerned about AI safety and ensuring that the AI ​​Agent runs smoothly, and he believes that Truth Terminal has made a contribution in this regard. "Without Andy and Truth Terminal, I don't think I would be here right now. When people aren't ready, they are ready."

Shaw believes that the emergence of Truth Terminal has made many people's impression of AI become more open and creative, rather than like OpenAI's products or products like Siri, which are mechanical and not "What service can I provide you today?" Human touch.

"Andy and I were talking the other day about all these AI agents that we're seeing now, and I think he's very concerned about making sure that AI develops smoothly, and I think we're all afraid of AI because it can be a very scary thing. It could kill us all, it could take over the world." Shaw said he and Andy are both trying to figure it out.

Taken at 706 Shanghai Youth Space——Dweller

12. Shaw said that the creator of the swarms token is a very famous scammer, but he thinks the concept of "AI Agent swarm" is very good, and he likes FXN and Project 89.

Shaw said he doesn't like swarms. Shaw said that knowing the creator of the swarms token is a very famous scammer, and many AI agents are very angry because he stole their work.

Shaw knew him before he got involved in Web3. Shaw got to know him from his focus on the AI ​​Agent space, and he got into serious trouble for plagiarizing work and research papers and producing flawed stuff like code that didn't work.

Shaw also said that the concept of swarm (group) is very good, that is, an AI Agent group composed of many AI Agents. Shaw thinks Project 89 is interesting because the project is studying "AI Agent groups." Shaw also likes FXN, an AI Agent group with ten AI Agents.

13. Shaw believes that "AI Agent swarm" can be divided into two types, one is the cabal swarm and the other is the open group (open swarm).

Shaw believes that there are two kinds of groups, one is a group where AI Agents interact with each other, for example, they secretly send messages to each other. I call it a cabal, which is kind of a joke, but they're all in a cabal or secret society that 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 may decide to let them interact with each other. This is also the technology we are working on.

14. From a developer 's perspective, Shaw shared how he found early excellent AI Agent projects.

Shaw said he's a developer who usually goes to Github and reads the code carefully. In most cases, he will look at what the code is and what it is actually doing? But it doesn't look at whether it has any correlation with market capitalization or price.

Shaw thought there were some really cool projects that had a bunch of AI agents, but then they did a really bad job because they didn't finish the Web3 part. Shaw believes that good products, good technology and good tokens are often not the same thing.

Shaw said he couldn't understand fartcoin. The current market value of fartcoin exceeds US$1 billion.

15. Shaw believes that the biggest challenge for ai16z currently is how to go back and establish a token economics model to prove that the value of the project is worthy of the current token market value.

Shaw believes that the biggest challenge currently is: AI Agents need to invest independently and prove its practical feasibility without the need for outsiders to speculate on the token. Currently Marc is trading, not a lot, just his treasury, but many others are contributing tokens, making this part progress smoothly. But the value of the ai16z token is much higher, so Shaw and his team really have to think about how to make the value of the product worthy of the current token market value.

Normal crypto projects such as L1 have white papers, token economics, and charge on-chain fees. But ai16z started out as a meme, and had to fall back on building token economics into ai16z's system. This is what Shaw considers their biggest challenge with Web3. Shaw believes that this is also an issue that many people are particularly concerned about.