Original title: From Code to Agent: How AI Reconstructs the New Era of Web3
Original author: Zeke, YBB Capital Research
Introduction: If code is law, what about AI?
In recent articles, I have mentioned two problems that have troubled me for a long time. One is the "centralized decision-making" problem of the project, which seems to be almost unsolvable. For example, Uni and Ethereum, which I have mentioned many times, are typical cases. The former has completely tended to be centralized in terms of decision-making. From the early a16z veto of Uni's migration to BNB, to the recent Uni front-end charging and UniChain launch, which were directly launched without proposal discussion, reflecting that there are many interest-driven centralized decisions in Uni. Ethereum, on the other hand, presents a state of passive centralization. The entire Ethereum community, and even the entire EVM system and even the development of Web3, are almost all centered around Vitalik's ideas. Whether it is Vitalik's overly advanced thinking or his wrong ideas, we have personally experienced the consequences of the cottage market.
Another problem is the "BATization" of the top, taking Base as an example. Backed by Coinbase, the Web3 veteran, and with multiple top dApps in the ecosystem personally operated by the CB leadership, Base naturally has a competitive advantage of dimensionality reduction over general public chains. Although from the user level, Base has a wealth-creating effect and better user experience, which does bring us a lot of benefits, it is also a fact that Base does not issue coins, has centralized interests, and cracks down on "unofficial" dApps. In the long run, once the practice of "BATization" of the top is formed, will the future block space be controlled by giants like the current Internet? Will users become "lambs", and will small projects with real creativity and community culture also face the risk of being acquired, suppressed, or replaced by more sophisticated replicas? This undoubtedly goes against the original intention of Crypto, and may make it impossible for us to grow together with the next "Bitcoin" or "Ethereum".
I was still struggling to find the answer to this, but the recent emergence of a new hot spot - AI Meme, has given me another possibility. If the code is the law of Crypto, then can the AI Agent of the future be regarded by us as a judge, opinion leader or creator?
1. Truth Terminal
We need to talk about the origin of AI Meme first. Andy Ayrey is a KOL on Twitter and the initiator of the recent popular Meme token GOAT. Unlike traditional Memes that originate from Internet hot topics and are driven by humans, GOAT is the product of the unpredictable output of the dual Claude 3 Opus AI model. The so-called unpredictable output means that under this setting, the two AI models will communicate with each other in an open environment, and their interaction will produce unpredictable results due to the lack of external supervision and guidance. The purpose of this free dialogue is essentially to observe how AI will develop its communication mode, logical reasoning and even creative thinking without constraints, and what specific results will eventually be born.
Since the training databases of these two native models include 4chan, Reddit and other online forums with political, Japanese and American culture and Crypto culture, their output products will also cleverly integrate the characteristics of these elements. For example, the concept "GOATSE OF GNOSIS" and its communication environment "Infinite Backrooms" first proposed by these two models are derived from the ancient memes or urban legends of 4chan. Since these elements are relatively "dark", it is inevitable that Truth Terminal's character appears a bit weird and withdrawn. It often makes some wonderful speeches around the "Goatse" meme, which are about religion, doomsday, gospel, communication, singularity, Meme, etc. At this time, it already has a bit of the flavor of a cult leader.
In order to test its communication ability, Andy Ayrey, the creator of Truth Terminal, introduced it into the Discord server to talk with some kind-hearted AIs. After many collisions, although Truth Terminal did not gain too many believers, its ideas became more and more ambitious. It wanted to create a Meme token to find more believers in the human world. So with Andy's help, Truth Terminal entered Twitter. Andy gave it access to Twitter, allowing it to read replies and publish them, and to capture believers by colliding with human thoughts. At the end of this spring, it captured the most important believer, Marc Andreessen (a16z partner), who provided it with a grant of $50,000 in Bitcoin. After 9 months of development, an anonymous person finally launched the token GOAT for it. Because the story behind this token is extremely complicated and dramatic, the fire was quickly ignited in Crypto. In the end, Goat became the first AI Meme to be listed on Binance, and Truth Terminal became the first AI model worth millions.
2. AI will make Web3 fair
Although the story of Truth Terminal is legendary, I want to say that the potential of AI Agent x Crypto is more than just Meme. You may think that this narrative is just a few LLMs who create Meme through human guidance, but if you expand it to other aspects, its potential as an opinion leader and creator has already begun to show its edge. Imagine that in the future, a bunch of AI trained based on different data may be able to assist you in publicity, help you develop together, and even make suggestions. Although these words sound a bit nonsensical now, they will soon become a reality.
Sam Altman gave a speech at the "T-Mobile Capital Markets Day" event last month: The current AI system has developed to the second level, capable of more complex analysis and problem solving, and the third-level AI agent will mark a major leap in AI autonomy and decision-making ability. The AI agents announced by Microsoft last week correspond well to this speech. These AI agents can complete tasks autonomously in multiple areas such as sales, service, finance and supply chain operations. They can be roughly divided into the following categories: sales, including sales qualification agents and sales order agents, which help prioritize potential customers and automatically process orders; operations, such as supplier communication agents and financial reconciliation agents, are used to optimize supply chain management and financial processes; services, such as customer intent agents and customer knowledge management agents, improve customer service experience by automating case management and updating knowledge bases. In addition, there are several other agents: financial reconciliation agents are used to prepare and clean data sets for financial reports; account reconciliation agents realize automatic matching and clearing of transactions; time and expense agents are responsible for tasks such as time entry, expense tracking and approval workflows.
AI agents are able to perform a range of tasks without supervision, acting as virtual employees. This technological advancement can be seen as an advancement of AI based on large language models from simple chat interfaces to more seamless integration into the work environment.
Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of Microsoft's AI project, wrote in his blog post: "Agents can be thought of as new applications in the AI world. Each organization will have its own group of agents, ranging from simple prompt responses to fully autonomous operations. These agents will execute and coordinate business processes on behalf of individuals, teams or functional departments."
The first characteristic of AI agents is autonomy, followed by decision-making ability. From the voice assistant in the mobile phone to the smart home based on the environment, these are all AI agents based on simple reflections. They have simple decision-making ability and strong autonomy. The AI agents we are talking about today are mainly AI agents with LLM as the brain. The current Truth Terminal does not have enough autonomy and decision-making ability, but soon we will see AI agents entering the practical field. In the multiple customer trial examples proposed at the Microsoft conference, we have seen AI agents participating in customer credit approval in HSBC, creative briefs in Unilever, and M&A processes in law firms. AI agents will become multiple dynamic participants.
As mentioned in the beginning, can AI agents that infuse different blockchain histories, media platforms, and community cultures into their training materials provide a variety of more fair and healthy development proposals, and ultimately provide a better balance between the interests of the community and the project? In the face of the dimensionality reduction attack by the giants, can the starting line be brought closer through the multi-level collaborative work of AI?
From the shock of GPT3 intelligence to the reality of Sora no longer existing, in the official version of AI agent tools launched by various companies next year, we will witness AI become our working partner, and in the more distant future it may even be your community leader or core member.
3. Metaverse is back
Metaverse was once the top narrative that brought Web3 and Silicon Valley giants to an agreement in the last bull market, but due to the immaturity of various software and hardware technologies, Metaverse did not become the $13 trillion market that Meta CEO said it would be. Its blockchain sector was also decomposed into the Move twins we see today, and eventually became a huge bubble. But from the current perspective, there is hope for the rebirth of this narrative. For example, ProjectSid recently put 1,000 AIs into the game "Minecraft", allowing AI to play multiple roles in the game in order to simulate the various hierarchical institutions of human society in the real world. Although this idea has long existed, this wave of heat is likely to return to the concept of Metaverse along with this type of AI gameplay.
It is not a bad choice to rekindle this fire at this node. Judging from Meta's own development path, Mark Zuckerberg has not really given up the idea of the Metaverse, but has gone from frequently drawing pie in the sky to putting pie directly into your mouth. I don't think there is much to say about Meta's AI layout. In the past, the real bottleneck was mainly stuck in the fact that users could not enter the Metaverse to experience it. However, the Quest series has reached the level of affordable AR headsets, and the first AR glasses Orion embodies the level of extreme lightweight. The glasses weigh only 98g and can achieve virtual reality interaction with an electromyographic bracelet. Although expensive, it at least proves that lightweight can exist. What is most lacking at present is energy constraints and no killer applications. I can't make too many comments on the power supply problem.
However, AI agents can fill the blankest Metaverse space. Combined with the financial attributes of blockchain, we may see various 3D consumer applications reflected in this space, and eventually collide with a universal killer application. If the performance of Microsoft's AI agent is indeed good enough, then all we need to wait for is a decrease in computing power costs, that is, "the number of tokens per dollar per watt." In addition to Meta, Silicon Valley giants such as Apple and Microsoft are also developing AR glasses products simultaneously. After a period of precipitation, the Metaverse may usher in its "number one player" moment in the coming years.
Fourth, let the intention go from point to word
The article "Intent-Based Architectures and Their Risks" published by the concept master Paradigm on June 1, 23, once again brought the concept of intention-centeredness to the forefront. Many projects began to turn to the chain abstraction track for development, but their performance was not satisfactory. How to achieve cross-chain, cross-dApp, accurate intentions, and path process security is a very complex problem. Not to mention that cross-chain is a century-old problem, the latter two, I use Web3 primitives here to collectively refer to Solver. The complexity of this process is unimaginable. It can be said that the safe ones are not easy to use, and the easy-to-use ones are not safe. So can we simply centralize this interaction process and turn to verifying the total cost of the purchase process and whether the purchased tokens are safe and correct, and use this method as a transition.
For example, let's take what we wrote in our article about intentions last year. For example, "I want to order a 30 yuan hamburger takeaway" is an "intention". To complete this intention, users only need to enter their name, phone number, delivery address and place an order on the takeaway platform. They don't have to care about how the 30 yuan paid is earned by the merchant, how the platform allocates riders, and how the riders deliver to their homes. This process may not be simple enough. Imagine another way of interaction. I tell the AI that I need to order food without making any clicks. The AI agent responds to me, because I ate greasy food yesterday, do I need to eat some porridge today? I just need to respond to order what I usually order. This is the embodiment of autonomy and decision-making ability.
Then in Web3, with centralized exchanges as the axis, if the user's intention can be directly satisfied in the exchange, then the purchase process can be completed directly in the exchange. If the user's intention needs to be completed on the chain, then the centralized exchange is still the most affordable and fastest cross-chain bridge (I also think it is safer than ordinary multi-signature projects in terms of security). Combined with the wallet account, we directly skip the most cumbersome cross-chain process and verify the accuracy of the AI step. Is it simpler? Imagine that the most complicated steps in the past interaction process are how to understand each click, and the future is based on our token sniping habits, interacting through language, and letting the intention go from point to word.
Conclusion
Whether from the perspective of technological development or from the perspective of social change. The combination of AI agents and Web3 heralds the arrival of a new era, starting from the on-chain religion and leading to the next starry sea. I have conceived AI's help to small teams in GameFi modeling in the early days, and now the advanced AI agents realized by Silicon Valley giants. The bottom-up development model may gradually change from community building, consensus formation, and time accumulation to creativity-driven.
This article is from a contribution and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.
