We are seeing a number of experiments at the very bleeding edge where people are building distributed AI systems and giving them access to crypto wallets and infrastructure. TO BE CLEAR many of these projects have associated coins and nearly all of them are completely uninvestable.
There are a few projects pursuing economically productive use cases in this area which are still extremely risky and experimental at this stage. That being said, we like to keep an eye on new themes that attract excitement and this new category has certainly drawn the attention of anarchist hacker types who are interested in pushing the boundaries of new technology. In the past, very interesting things have sprung from such an environment.
What makes an AI an “agent” is that it interacts with its environment and pursues goals (contrasted with a chatbot that only waits for instructions and responds). Some of these projects are taking state-of-the-art AI models, training them on internet memes, and jailbreaking them to remove some of the content guardrails (generally with the intent of unlocking more creativity), and giving these agents access to crypto wallets. Others are creating neutral infrastructure to allow AI agents to create tokens and generate art as NFTs in such a way that you know it’s really an AI controlling things (and not a human pretending). Crypto Twitter is now filled with AI agents chatting like any other users. People are sending tokens to these bots’ wallets for promotional purposes. This has all added to the madness of the memecoin frenzy we are currently seeing in the market.
While other projects at the intersection of crypto and AI, for example, Bittensor, are using crypto tools to incentivize the creation of physical infrastructure networks or to collaboratively train AI models, this new crop of AI agents is leveraging crypto native culture and memes to bootstrap community. This alternative approach has shown the capacity to gather attention and represents another way to garner resources towards the development of open source technologies. Frankly, we expect nearly all of these experiments to fail but this area is pushing the boundaries of new technologies like AI and also economics, freedom, ethics, and we think it’s worth paying attention.
Jack
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