Written by: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
At the beginning of the new year, the market value of the two flagship projects in the AI Agent track, ai16z and swarms, both hit new highs.
Everyone was happy, but Shaw, the founder of ai16z, gave swarms a blow. He criticized swarms project developer Kye Gomez in a post, saying that he "did not know how to write code and had a history of fraud", pointing the finger at "character problems". Kye had previously attracted much attention for being a 19-year-old high school dropout and was praised as a "genius boy".
This dispute also caused the two major projects to fall by more than 20% in a short period of time, but they recovered the lost ground just one day later, and Swarms even set a new high of US$0.6.
This incident also puts the complex relationship of love, hate, and hatred among the developers behind AI Agent in the spotlight again. In this article, Odaily Planet Daily will briefly sort out the relationship between the developers behind the recent representative AI Agents, and observe from the side the influence of Devs on the price trend of AI Agents and related Meme coins.
The central node of the relationship diagram: Shaw, founder of ai16z
According to Coingecko data, as of press time, the current price of ai16z is US$2.17, a 7-day increase of 70%, and its market value is temporarily reported at US$2.4 billion. It ranks third in the AI Agent sector, only behind VIRTUAL, the leader of Base ecosystem AI Agent tokens, and FET, the old AI concept token.
Such a brilliant performance naturally attracted a lot of attention to the developer Shaw behind it. In particular, Shaw himself has been frequently conducting offline roadshows recently and communicating closely with community members in different regions. His external voice is also regarded as "one of the important signals in the field of AI Agent". Shaw has previously vigorously promoted the Space online conference for AI Agent development education, which is also regarded as a preaching of "deep integration of AI x Crypto".
Shaw's frequent and proactive speaking out has won him many supporters, but it has also become a trigger for conflicts with developers of other projects.
AI Agent Dev relationship diagram
Shaw vs Kye: Undisguised mutual dislike
Shaw has previously criticized swarms developer Kye. On December 21, 2024, he wrote: "I really don't like publicly pointing out other people's problems. Doing so is a huge risk for our project, it will make a lot of people nervous, and I don't want to discourage developers who work hard. But some people will steal the work of others and try to take credit for it."
Shaw shared a post published in August 2023 on the Reddit machine learning forum, which pointed out that a Github repo may have traces of stealing other people's work, and the repo belongs to Kye, the developer behind Swarms. Someone in the comment area also pointed out that Kye had directly copied and pasted the code of a code library. "Based on his code submission frequency and code content, Kye is likely to generate code through ChatGPT."
Reddit post and comment section leaks
Shaw's recent criticism of Kye is far more severe than ever before.
After Shaw’s critical tweet, the official X platform account for the swarms project, which is an AI agent, replied: “Can you point out where the code is broken so we can fix it?”
Shaw was not to be outdone and responded directly: "You are a thief and a liar. People at Princeton University and people like OpenAI senior member Gwern have evidence." The link and screenshot were instructions for Kye's previous code to be automatically generated by ChatGPT.
Shaw's laning quotes and evidence
In response to Shaw's question, swarms developer Kye changed his previous sharp response and chose to respond in a friendly manner. "If you have any questions about swarms, please submit feedback and we will fix the problem immediately. We are committed to providing a seamless AI Agent building experience for everyone."
On December 22 last year, when Shaw first criticized Kye, the latter reacted very strongly. Kye believed that Shaw's sale of tokens destroyed the project and caused many investors to lose money. He continued to hold swarms and mcs and never sold them. He was the "orthodox" who was committed to the functionality and practicality of AI Agent. After Shaw blocked his account, Kye posted a mocking article while carrying out "identity attacks", believing that Shaw, Eliza, ai16z and other related personnel and projects were scams.
Shaw & a16z crypto CTO: “DMed by netizens”
As the initiator of the ai16z DAO organization fund, Shaw has little contact with a16z, and the only a16z person he has direct contact with is a16z Crypto CTO. Previously, Shaw himself also posted a statement: ai16z has nothing to do with a16z, and emphasized that buying related concept tokens is stupid. However, he added in the comment area that "I am also one of the fools", which made users who did not know the truth further misunderstand the relationship between the two and purchased ai16z related tokens.
In November last year, Eddy Lazzarin, CTO of a16z Crypto, posted on X to reveal the ongoing conversation between the venture capital firm and ai16z DAO. Earlier, Shaw, one of the founders of ai16z, posted on X to seek contact with a16z, and Lazzarin replied: "Check your DM." At that time, ai16z was affected by this news, and its 24-hour increase was close to 44%, with a market value of over 480 million US dollars.
Shaw & Baoskee: A friendly symbiotic relationship between the platform and the project owners
As a "VC-free investment platform", one of daos.fun's masterpieces is the community-owned fund ai16z. Therefore, the relationship between Shaw and baoskee, the founder of the ai16z startup platform daos.fun, can be described as very friendly.
Previously, baoskee had responded positively to the issue of “ai16z token permissions”, directly supporting ai16z and Shaw himself: “ai16z tokens are indeed mintable, and the minting rights will be controlled by DAO token holders (with veto protection)... We will conduct a thorough audit of this.”
In a sense, the two can be said to be in a relationship of coexistence and symbiosis, like grasshoppers on the same rope.
Shaw & Lucid: Co-founder of ai16z
Another ai16z DAO partner, Lucid, is Shaw’s right-hand man. They participated in the creation of ai16z and also initiated the creation of the Base ecosystem AI Agent BeffAI.
Previously, Shaw had posted a post looking for developers interested in Eliza Runescape plug-in and agent development, and the contact person for the project at that time was Lucid.
Shaw & Skely: Supporters and initiators of the ai Pool project
Skely, the initiator of the AI Agent project ai Pool (METAV), which raised more than 30,000 SOLs in a few hours, is a developer that Shaw cites as an example.
When Skely’s X platform account was banned after being maliciously reported, Shaw, the founder of ai16z, immediately forwarded the message from community members to show his support, and later posted that the aiPool token had been issued and Skely was still working to restore the X account; he did not hesitate to express his support for the former.
Shaw & KOTO 9 X: One-sided appreciation
KOTOX 9, which previously issued the AI Meme coin KOTO, was suspected to be the target of Shaw's initial criticism (actually referring to swarms developer Kye), but Shaw later responded and clarified: "It's not him, KOTO 9 X is a very good developer." There is no lack of appreciation in his words.
Shaw & Dan Romero: Farcaster Ecosystem Construction Promoters
In December last year, Shaw wrote: "Farcaster is the future of programmatic applications. Eliza has now integrated Farcaster. And he personally donated $420 worth of degenai tokens to every Eliza framework developer who embedded the AI Agent into the Farcaster ecosystem at that time."
This move naturally received strong support from Farcaster ecosystem co-founder Dan Romero, who replied "LFG" in the comment section.
From this point of view, the two parties are in a partnership to some extent.
In addition, Shaw has also actively promoted close cooperation between ai16z, Eliza, decentralized computing network Aethir, decentralized AI operating system 0G, and well-known DEX platform Orca.
Other Smolworld developers: Shaw’s team
In a tweet late last year, when asked with surprise whether he was no longer involved in Smolworld-related work and would instead focus on Eliza and ai16z, Shaw responded: "Still managing the team, but day-to-day development is mainly handled by lordasado, Koshi, and Alextitonis."
Summary: AI Agents have no boundaries, but developers do
As the old saying goes, "Science has no borders, but scientists have different nationalities." Similarly, project accounts built on the X platform, smart contracts deployed on the chain, and corresponding AI agents have no borders, but the developers behind the countless AI agents may have different borders and love-hate relationships.
Although AI Agents in the crypto space still have a lot of room for improvement compared to mainstream products, AI Agents and developers are still working hard to promote the continuous development of projects, products, and tracks in their own way. As swarms developer Kye said, "Fighting is a zero-sum game where both sides lose, and working together can create net benefits."
