Author: Jessy, Golden Finance
Recently, AI16Z founder Shaw launched a Fud to an AI Agent project Swarms on the X platform, saying on his X platform that the founder of Swarms was a liar and could not write code.
Affected by the news, Swarms' project token SWARMS fell by more than 20% in 24 hours, but it still maintained a 7-day increase of more than 400%, and the current token market value is nearly US$300 million.
In addition to the direct confrontation between the founder of AI16Z, which caused a lot of public opinion storm. During this period, Swarms and AI16Z have been controversial on Twitter, and the differences between the two in technical architecture and application have also caused widespread discussion.
Currently, the AI agent track is undoubtedly a blue ocean, but competition is also fierce, especially since leading projects like Virtuals Protocol and the AI16Z ecosystem occupy over 50% of the market value in this track. How did Swarms manage to break through without relying on these two major 'AI agent groups'? What innovations and unique features does the project itself have? And is its founder Kye Gomez really a fraud who can't even write code, as Shaw claims?
Transitioning from Web2 to Web3: Swarms
Swarms was initiated by the current 20-year-old Kye Gomez in 2022. It is a multi-agent LLM framework aimed at developers, allowing multiple AI agents to collaborate like a team to solve complex business operation needs through smart orchestration and efficient collaboration. The framework offers powerful scalability, supports seamless integration with external AI services and APIs, and provides long-term memory functions for AI agents, enhancing contextual understanding.
In its latest released white paper, it provides a detailed explanation of the philosophy of Swarms and its uniqueness. According to the white paper, Swarms is a multi-agent collaborative AI agent, which differs from individual agents like GPT-4, which are large prediction models. Although these individual agents are powerful, they have significant limitations in handling complex tasks. Multi-agent collaborative AI agents like Swarms allow agents to cooperate with each other, specialize in their tasks, and thereby improve overall efficiency.
The algorithm of Swarms aims to address many challenges in multi-agent collaboration, such as task assignment, resource management, and coordination. Through the Swarms algorithm, agents can quickly exchange information and automatically assign tasks based on task requirements and their own capabilities to ensure that each task is executed by the most suitable agent.
It is evident that the core concept of its operation draws inspiration from collective intelligence systems in nature, such as swarms of bees and ants, introducing this efficient collaborative model into the field of artificial intelligence and emphasizing seamless cooperation among multiple AI agents to handle complex tasks.
The project's token is SWRAMS, which serves as the universal currency for transactions and collaboration among agents. Agents can use SWRAMS to pay service fees, acquire data resources, and participate in market transactions.
In the design of the project, the Swarm algorithm provides critical support for agent collaboration, while the SWARMS token serves as the universal currency of the agent economy, playing an irreplaceable role in facilitating agent transactions and incentivizing agents to participate in economic activities. According to the latest news from the project team, in an upcoming new feature, users will be able to use SWARMS tokens to buy and sell agents.
According to Kye Gomez, currently, over 45 million AI agents have been born from the Swarms development framework, providing efficient solutions for multiple industries, including finance, insurance, and healthcare.
Initially, the project was just a Web2 AI agent project. According to the founder, the project has been running for three years. The project only issued tokens on December 18, 2024, which means that at this point, the project officially transitioned from Web2 to Web3.
The project currently enjoys a high community presence among numerous AI agents, thanks to its product philosophy and innovation. Currently, industry insiders generally believe that the next stage for AI agents is collective collaboration (Agent Swarms), achieving more efficient work through communication and cooperation among multiple agents. This approach allows agents from different frameworks to interact and leverage their specialized advantages to perform better in specific tasks and scenarios. Swarms has tapped into this billion-dollar development trend.
Another reason for the project's explosive popularity is that its founder, Kye Gomez, is a highly controversial figure.
Controversies Behind the Genius Founder
The core founder of Swarms, Kye Gomez, is hailed as a 'genius boy' in the field of artificial intelligence. In his self-statement, he mentioned that he dropped out of high school, and his experience of developing Swarms and successfully operating 45 million AI agents in three years has attracted people's attention and curiosity.
Not only has he started the project Swarms, but according to data, he also has other excellent projects and research achievements in the AI field. For example, in the open-source AI research lab Agora, he has focused on the combination of AI with biology and nanotechnology, providing technical support for the intersection of these two cutting-edge fields. In addition, he developed Pegasus, a project focused on natural language processing and embedding models; he also participated in the open-source implementation of AlphaFold3, providing tool support for research in biology.
In his self-statement, Kye Gomez wrote: 'I grew up in Hialeah, one of the worst cities in Florida, a fourth-world hell with rampant crime. I never finished high school. In fact, I was expelled from three high schools.'
After graduating from high school, I never attended college. I only have an office in a small town in Doral, Miami. Additionally, I have mastered PyTorch skills and can implement research papers without code, as researchers in large academia and industry do not want to open-source their code.
Then, when some implementations became popular for being genuinely useful, such as Tree of Thoughts, I faced brutal attacks from AI elites who wanted to gain all the attention and credit for work that didn't belong to them, such as the people behind Tree of Thoughts and OpenAI.
Since last year, I have implemented hundreds of research paper models for free, and aside from the endless verbal harassment from elites and their rulers, I have received no compensation.
In his self-statement, we can see Kye Gomez as a young man from a 'small town.' Although he possesses considerable talent, he has spent a long time leveraging that talent to carve out a place for himself in the elite-filled field of AI.
This statement may explain why Swarms has been deeply rooted in Web2 but has recently shifted towards Web3, which allows it to realize the 'monetization of talent.' It has proven to be the right choice, as Swarms has emerged, with a current market value reaching 300 million dollars.
According to media reports, Kye Gomez began learning to program at the age of 10 and applied his newly acquired programming knowledge to games, which ultimately led him to understand artificial intelligence. Gomez stated in an interview that at the age of 13, he created his first AI model to hack his mother's Gmail account to obtain PlayStation codes for shopping in the platform's store. Since then, Gomez has become obsessed with artificial intelligence and data science. Previously, he developed an AI assistant based on Slack through APAC AI.
Kye Gomez's initial rise to fame was not due to the products he released, but rather because he questioned OpenAI's new product for plagiarizing Swarms. In 2024, OpenAI released an open-source product—the Swarm framework—for building, orchestrating, and deploying multi-agent systems. Upon seeing the product, Kye Gomez stated, 'The Swarms framework is the first production-grade multi-agent orchestration framework in history. OpenAI stole our name, code, and methods. Everything, from the syntax of agent structures to Swarm class objects, came from our code base.'
However, Kye Gomez's public questioning of OpenAI's theft did not provoke public support for him. Some netizens dug up his past accusations and pointed out that, based on the README documents published on GitHub by both sides, it is clear that OpenAI is somewhat more reliable. The general sentiment is that Kye Gomez's hard insistence on plagiarism raises suspicions of opportunism. OpenAI has not responded to the allegations of plagiarism against Kye Gomez.
The Entanglement of Swarms and AI16Z
Faced with the rapidly growing project Swarms, AI16Z's founder Shaw couldn't sit still; he claimed on X that the founder of Swarms is a fraud and cannot write code. However, netizens were not impressed by Shaw's remarks, urging him to 'mind his own business.'
Currently, projects in the AI16Z ecosystem are undoubtedly the hottest ticket in the AI agent track, with its founder Shaw having sufficient authority in the industry, being referred to as the 'Godfather of AI.'
The questioning of Kye Gomez has undoubtedly sparked heated discussions. Discussions within the community are not only focused on Kye Gomez himself but also involve comparisons between the two products. The comparison primarily centers on Eliza and Swarms, where Eliza is an open-source modular architecture developed by Shaw, mainly used to create AI agents that can seamlessly interact with users and blockchain systems.
AI16Z is designed based on this framework and has itself become a representative project of AI agent frameworks.
The most significant difference between these two products is that Eliza is aimed at a single AI agent, while Swarms focuses on coordination among multiple AI agents. To put it more simply for developers, Eliza is a development framework for a single AI agent, allowing developers to quickly build an AI agent project according to this framework. In contrast, Swarms provides tools for developers, allowing them to use these tools and experiences to freely create their own, less standardized AI agent projects, focusing on cooperation among AI agents.
It can be said that Eliza is the current state of blockchain AI agents, while Swarms represents the future development of AI agents. This is also the imaginative part of Swarms.
