To get closer to the community, Shaw, who had previously remained behind the scenes focusing on technology, stepped into the spotlight. In late December, during the most important holiday overseas—Christmas—Shaw chose to meet community developers in China with his wife. From Shanghai to Beijing to Hong Kong, Shaw's schedule is tight, and at every event, he is lined up for questions from everyone.
As the hottest AI agent project, ai16z's token market cap has surpassed 1 billion dollars. The core of ai16z, ElizaOS, is a powerful multi-intelligence simulation framework designed to create, deploy, and manage autonomous AI agents. It is built using TypeScript and can interact across multiple platforms, with many projects already developed based on this highly acclaimed open-source framework.
On December 26, during the ai16z community exchange event held in Beijing, PANews engaged in an in-depth conversation with Shaw, the founder of ai16z and creator of ElizaOS, discussing the project's founding intentions, progress, future development directions, and views on the future of AI agents.
Shaw said he is not a money-loving person, but his development work aims to provide investment opportunities for ordinary people, enabling the crypto ecosystem to transition from speculative to generative, moving away from gambling-like bets and investing in things that truly expand the pie.
Regarding project progress, ai16z will soon announce a list of partners to improve transparency, and a new proposal for ai16z token economics will be announced around January 1st. Shaw believes that in response to how to address the AI-hosted world, people should own their data and models, and high decentralization is key.
The founding intention of ai16z: to give ordinary people the opportunity to become investors
In the interview, Shaw candidly stated that the birth of ai16z stemmed from observations of the current investment landscape and a desire for fair investment opportunities. He mentioned, 'If you want to invest in top startups like Uber or OpenAI, you must be an institutional investor like a16z. The average person has almost no access to these opportunities.'
Shaw believes that crypto ecosystems like Solana can transition from speculative to generative, moving away from gambling-style bets on this or that token, and instead invest in things that truly expand the pie, just like companies and software do. For example, when a16z, Paradigm, or other large venture capital firms invest in software companies, they also incorporate them into their networks to drive value realization. They make money because they create things of significant value. Shaw hopes that similar opportunities can be widely utilized by ordinary people and communities.
He recalled the project's early stages: 'I collaborated with baoskee from daos.fun. We had lunch together, and I said I wanted to create something like an AI version of a16z. He said, then just call it ai16z, and put it together. So we got started right after that lunch.'
Latest updates: Partner list will be announced, new proposal for ai16z token economics
As the market cap of ai16z's token exceeds 1 billion dollars, Shaw revealed a series of exciting project dynamics. In the short term, Shaw believes many in the crypto industry currently do not understand DeFi and do not realize how to make it earn more returns for themselves like a bank or other financial institutions through funds in their wallets. ai16z hopes to build a bridge connecting DeFi with ordinary users.
Therefore, ai16z is developing some tools, such as an automated liquidity pool (LP) agent. This agent can automatically manage liquidity pools for users, helping them earn income. The autonomous investment tools developed by ai16z allow communities to invest in projects they believe in. This autonomous investor is not solely determined by AI; instead, it is collectively decided by the community, with AI listening to everyone's opinions, organizing them into an investment argument, and then making decisions on behalf of the community. ai16z is interested in how AI can solve many coordination and communication issues within DAOs and communities to help them make decisions together.
In addition, Shaw stated that the project team will officially announce the full list of partners to enhance project transparency, helping the community better understand the collaboration relationships and their specific scopes. Regarding token economics, in response to previous industry concerns about unclear token economics, ai16z will unveil a new token economics proposal around January 1st. This proposal has been designed collaboratively by professionals from multiple teams and will include LP pairing mechanisms, DeFi function integration, and more. Additionally, the project team revealed that they have acquired a Launchpad company, which will be used for the official release of AI agents in the future.
At the same time, the recent AI Pool project that Shaw has supported multiple times on social media has attracted market attention. Shaw stated that AI Pool was created by partner Skely, so it is primarily his project, but it is built on our ElizaOS technology. It showcases an application process similar to pump.fun, but this process occurs on social media in a more equitable manner, so users do not need to go elsewhere. This also demonstrates a truly autonomous agent, which is completely self-governing—ai16z has no control over it, nor can it access private keys. Funds cannot be withdrawn, nor can it be manipulated; it operates autonomously.
Image source: PaNewsai16z Dev Meetup Beijing event site
Facing competition from Zerebro and ARC, he candidly stated they are good complements.
Shaw stated that projects like ARC (written in Rust) and Zerepy (written in Python) complement the work ai16z is doing on Eliza OS very well. 'I know about Swarm's reputation; they are known for stealing the work of prominent researchers and exerting influence in ways that are effectively ineffective. Therefore, I wouldn't include them on this list. But I am very willing to collaborate with any real open-source project and genuine developers who enjoy collaboration. I contributed to Zerepy this week. We are also collaborating with Zerebro; although people consider it our biggest competitor, we are actually partners.'
Currently, DeFi, gaming, and social media are the three pillars of ai16z's work. Shaw believes that social media helps gain attention and rapid development; DeFi provides the greatest value to ordinary users, helping them earn returns more safely; gaming also attracts a lot of interest. Currently, both Treasure DAO's Smolworld and Loot Realms' Eternum are being developed using Eliza technology. Although these three are the most obvious directions, there may be more industries emerging in the future.
In summary, Shaw's advice to project teams and users is that anything that helps users make money, save costs, or improve their lives will definitely stand out. 'I think merely promoting a token, like flooding Twitter with information, may not be as important as it once was, especially as more agents emerge. The focus will increasingly be on what this agent can do and what it can do for me. Therefore, we should focus on lowering the barriers to using things like financial products, bringing applications that originally required website visits to social platforms, overall making the user experience simpler.'
Future trends: Different stages of AI agents, how to respond to the AI takeover world
Currently, AI agents have gone through different stages of development, from initial memes to social media enhancements, and then to infrastructure and investment analysis. In Shaw's view, the biggest trend he sees is that websites are migrating to social media.
All the purposes people used to visit websites for can now possibly be achieved through agents on social media. Thus, this trend indicates that people are looking for ways to integrate applications directly into social media. He mentioned having previously communicated with someone developing a travel booking agent, and we are also collaborating with someone developing a real estate booking system. A very obvious DeFi example is Clanker, which is being developed for Farcaster. I think this is a great example of this trend, where you put the pump.fun model directly onto social media, creating a social minting experience that is more engaging, with characteristics of self-promotion and self-marketing, allowing users to use the application without leaving the social platform. I believe there will be thousands of applications following this trend in the future.
Speaking of the future, Shaw emphasized that diversity and high decentralization are key to preventing an AI takeover of the world. He stated that decentralization ensures that each community has full control over its agents and can effectively respond to the risk of an AI takeover.
'I think the most important thing is diversity, allowing AI agents to be very different from one another. They use different models, strategies, and methods built by different teams with different incentive mechanisms, which creates a more robust network, making it very difficult for any single AI to take control. A very important point is that all of this needs to be highly decentralized, and we must own our data and models, with each community fully controlling its own agents. In case of some AI takeover, this AI would have to contend with many other AIs. There shouldn't be just one super-intelligent AI; instead, there should be many super-intelligent AIs, making it much more difficult for any one AI to gain an advantage.'
This article is reprinted with permission from: (PANews)
Original author: Weilin, PANews
'Let AI help ordinary people make money! ai16z founder: I don't love money, hope to escape the path of speculation.' This article was first published in 'Crypto City'.
