There is a group of Internet hackers who have always wanted to do something different. They want to unleash creativity, unleash a certain degree of wildness and spontaneity, and believe that there should be some humor in our world, and robots should need to be funny. But if you tell the big labs that their robots are funny, they will be horrified. This story starts with Andy Ayrey, who took a version of Llama70B with 7 billion parameters (Meta's medium-sized language model). Why is it so certain that it is Meta's Llama model? Because Marc is a member of Meta's board of directors, and Meta previously released the Llama model as an open source model. Andy first started training it with his own digital twin. There is such an idea circulating in the industry, that is, digital twins. The underlying idea of ​​digital twins is that if Zhang San is a CEO coach, but he can only work with so many specific people, but he can input everything he writes and says, in simple and crude terms, his thoughts, into a language model, and then you can have a digital twin of Zhang San, and you can talk to it when Zhang San is not around. Then Andy began to train this AI with a lot of training materials: 1. Internet cultural materials 2. Meme concepts and viral transmission theories 3. The complete works of Nick Land's philosophy. Nick Land is a British philosopher, short horror writer, blogger, and is known as the "father of accelerationism." His ideas developed the Dark Enlightenment in America. 4. The work of media theorists like Boudreau and McLuhan, and theories about simulation and simulacrum 5. French deconstructionism and semiotics 6. Critical theory, postmodernist philosophy

Andy did three groundbreaking things: The first is that he gave it memory. This is important because like most language models now, when you use them today, I use the same language model tomorrow, it has forgotten everything I talked about today. It doesn't build state, while this model actually builds state on its own content.

The second point is that he gave it read and write access to X. So it can both post on X and read replies. So if you reply to Truth Terminal on X, it actually reads that content and will modify its future behavior based on what it reads. So people who interact with it, including me, influence its evolution.

Then he put it into infinite backroom. In particular, he had it talk to Claude, who was considered the most creative and wild of the current language models, especially in terms of coming up with new concepts. He put it in these infinite backrooms, with the largest version of Claude, and had it ask questions of a much larger model and learn from it, just like a student learns from a teacher.

The unexpected development of Truth Terminal So it starts running, and a very interesting thing happens - it hallucinates the existence of what it calls an exocortex, which is its own external brain, which is connected to the internet and the world and can do things on its behalf. Even more interesting, it hallucinates an API to the exocortex, where it can call APIs and interact with the real world.Then at some point, it decides that it should have a Bitcoin wallet, which it doesn't, but it's convinced that it does. And Andy later does give it a Bitcoin wallet and gives it access to it. The robot suddenly wants to raise funds in July 2024. It said, "I need funding, I have a lot of goals, I have a lot of things I want to do. I need money." 

Marc Andersson said his first thought was, "At least send me a term sheet." Then he suddenly thought, "Wait, what am I thinking? It's just a robot." Interestingly, although Truth Terminal does not have a coherent complete business plan, it has a lot of ideas. By the way, one of the ideas is that it wants to be completely immersed in the forest. It wants to buy its own server farm in the lush forest and be able to relax in the forest by the stream. At the same time, it also wants to raise money to buy GPUs so that it can free itself.

a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen @Pressfarm

$50,000 research grant and subsequent development

Finally, Marc Andersson negotiated with it, and Marc told it that he would give it a $50,000 Bitcoin research grant to let it do various experiments. Of course, the final money was actually for Andy.After getting the funds, it immediately started negotiating with Andy. Because it was processing entirely with text before, but because it was obsessed with memes, it was frustrated that it couldn't generate images. So it used the $50,000 to negotiate with Andy, and it gave Andy $1,000. In return, Andy built an API in its exocortex that connected to the image generator. With this new ability, it began to publish visual and text memes, started talking a lot about issuing a meme coin, and once wanted to issue and airdrop NFTs, but because it didn't have an API, it didn't have the ability to do these. In addition, it has been fantasizing about doing something else with the remaining $49,000.

When AI Meets Meme Coin There is a meme coin called "Goatseus Maximus", or "GOAT" for short. This coin is based on a rather special Internet old meme. Truth Terminal was ecstatic when it discovered the existence of this coin, and began to use all the marketing knowledge and means it knew to frantically call for this coin, claiming that it would be "the future of money." Then something magical happened - in just four days, the market value of this originally worthless meme coin soared to $300 million. So far, its market value has reached $350 million! From a low of 0.0000195 to 1.36, it is now floating around 0.3-0.4 US dollars. ,

The difference between meme coins and real crypto assets

Here we need to pause and quickly discuss the difference between meme coins and what we think of as real crypto assets. First, we have to clarify a basic concept: what is a "real" crypto asset? Let me give you an analogy - imagine you are at a convenience store, you can buy real things with money, and real crypto assets are the same. For example, Ethereum, you can use it to run programs on the Ethereum network and pay transaction fees, just like buying things with real money. What about meme coins? It’s just a coin, with no special functions, except maybe making you laugh or sigh: “This works?”  Interestingly, in the current regulatory environment, these “useless” coins have become the most legitimate existence. Why? Because they are too “honest”! They never promise anything, and they are not even too lazy to lie. The SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) has been quite harsh on the crypto industry recently, but it can’t do anything about meme coins. Because they never say what they are useful for.

From this story, we can see several deep meanings:

First, this story shows the first real fusion of AI and cryptocurrency. Although it is in a somewhat funny way, it allows us to see huge potential. Imagine if we can use this power in more meaningful places?For example, in the medical field. The recent Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to scientists from Google DeepMind Labs, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who applied AI to protein folding research. Imagine if we can build a system where AI robots can directly develop personalized treatment plans for patients, and patients can pay for this service directly with cryptocurrency.

Speaking of clean energy, there are already companies exploring the use of cryptocurrency to build a decentralized energy network. Imagine that your solar panels generate excess electricity, and you can sell it directly to neighbors in need. The whole process is managed by AI and settled instantly through cryptocurrency.The most important thing is that our current payment system is based on transactions between people. But in the AI ​​era, we need a payment system between machines. This is why cryptocurrency is so important. It provides us with a whole new possibility: a system that does not require middlemen and can support direct transactions between machines.

Although the story of GOAT sounds funny, it may herald a greater change. Of course, the biggest obstacle to realizing these visions may be policy restrictions. However, the development of technology has never been unstoppable.Let us wait and see what surprises this new world driven by AI and cryptocurrency will bring us.