The gap between ideal and reality of AI investment agents
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the concept of "AI investment agent" has also attracted increasing attention. People expect AI to take over their wallets and generate significant returns while controlling risk. However, foreign media pointed out that most of the products currently on the market that are advertised as "AI investment agents" do not actually have real agency functions, and there is a considerable gap with people's expectations.
If we are to believe that AI agents are the next big thing, it should at least do the following:
It can generate stable rates of return for users while controlling risks, such as an annualized rate of return (APY) of at least 30%.
In the cryptocurrency industry, a 30% return rate isn't great, but it's enough to beat the S&P 500. If the user specifies a "conservative" risk appetite, then the AI agent should act cautiously and only interact with DeFi smart contracts that have been tested for at least a year.
For example, an AI agent might consider using Pendle to lock users' funds in PT yield trades involving only "blue chip" protocols like Ethena (USDe) or Aave (GHO), while avoiding emerging high-risk ones like $USUAL Collateral. If the user specifies "30% APY", then the AI agent should avoid low-yield PTs like stETH.
Alternatively, the AI agent might believe that in a bull market year, the price of Ethereum could reach a high of $5,000, a 44% increase from today’s price. Rather than yield farming, the AI agent simply invests user funds in Ethereum and then stakes them on Lido to earn a risk-free 3% return.
Depending on market volatility and a black swan event that could cause Ethereum’s price to plummet, the AI agent should be able to swap it back for the stablecoin in a timely manner. Since the AI agent is told to be "conservative" by the user, airdrops should definitely not be considered given the long time lag between points acquisition and the actual airdrop for the project (too risky!).
Current AI agents are more like the Wizard from “The Wizard of Oz”
For now, however, there appears to be no reliable way for AI agents to navigate DeFi. As Dragonfly Capital’s Haseeb Qureshi said in a recent Steady Lads Podcast, today’s AI agents are more like the Wizard of Oz, lacking long-term plans and moving funds to achieve their goals.
Source: Steady Lads Podcast Haseeb Qureshi believes that current AI agents lack long-term plans and do not transfer funds to achieve their goals.
In the current AI cryptocurrency craze, we are seeing more meme coins with AI labels, AI virtual chatbots, and a lot of infrastructure construction. We already have a lot of meme coins, and putting “AI” on them is just a marketing ploy. Virtual chatbots like Luna already exist in Web2. The introduction of tokens does not make them particularly novel, and many tokens even do not have the "agent" function at all. An infrastructure boom around launch platforms and architectures may be necessary, but there's still a long way to go before we see truly agentic and autonomous agents. The closest proxies we currently have to "utility-based" are those that scrape social media data to generate alpha feeds, such as aixbt.
Huge gap still exists between AI agents and reality
All these phenomena indicate that there is still a huge gap between AI agents and reality. NFTs in 2020 have a certain level of legitimacy. The story that will propel NFTs (immutable works of art) into the mainstream is far-fetched, but all the technical elements are in place. The distance between memes and reality is still too far for AI agents. There are many technical and application challenges that need to be overcome for AI investment agents to be truly effective. For example, how to ensure the security of AI agents and prevent them from being used maliciously; how to let AI agents better understand users' risk preferences and make timely adjustments according to market changes; how to establish a complete regulatory structure to regulate AI agent behavior and more. Only when these problems are effectively solved can AI investment agents truly enter people's lives and bring substantial help to investors.
"The AI meme currency is booming?" Foreign media approval: Many AIs do not have agency functions at all and will encounter bottlenecks in the future. This article was first published in "Crypto City"
