Written by: Zhou Zhou, Foresight News
On the afternoon of December 22, 2024, ai16z founder Shaw and his wife Jill landed in Shanghai. That night, I, along with members of the 706 community (one of the largest youth communities in China) and developers and investors from the crypto community, welcomed him and had dinner together. The next day, I invited Shaw to my home for a chat before heading to a restaurant for lunch, and then took Shaw to his first meetup in China. I can say I witnessed Shaw's itinerary in Shanghai quite completely.
Shaw generously shared with us the next focus of work for ai16z and Eliza, described future prospects for AI Agents, and provided specific analysis and evaluation of dozens of well-known AI Agent projects, giving me and my companions a deeper understanding of the AI Agent space.
Looking back, Shaw and his founding of ai16z have been famous in the industry for only about a month, as a founder of a startup project, he has gained widespread and eager attention from many investors, developers, and media in the crypto industry. Why is this? I think it may be related to the hot trend of AI Agents in the crypto industry, and ai16z is precisely one of the core projects leading this AI Agent meme narrative wave.
The narrative of crypto AI Agents, although it has only started for a month, has already been regarded as one of the hottest topics of discussion in the current crypto industry, with many crypto practitioners identifying that AI Agents will become one of the main narratives of this round of the crypto cycle. And ai16z is one of the most well-known projects, having established the world's first VC AI Agent—ai16z DAO, the first well-known open-source AI Agent crypto framework—Eliza, and has gained the attention and recognition of Marc Andreessen, the founder of the well-known American venture capital firm a16z. As a result, the market cap of ai16z's token reached $1 billion within a month, and related tokens like DegenAI, Eliza, aiPool, etc. have also received wide attention from the community.
When this important narrative was born, crypto practitioners eagerly wanted to know what the real situation of the current AI Agent track is. Is it a bubble or real application? What is the latest progress in the US, and what will be the next development of AI Agents in the crypto industry? To this end, I summarized fifteen important pieces of information from the exchanges between Shaw and me over the past two days, including his observations and evaluations of ten different AI Agent projects.
1, Shaw is a serial entrepreneur of AI Agents living in San Francisco and was also a game developer.
Regarding Shaw's work and life background, Shaw stated that he lives in San Francisco, initially as a game developer, and will soon launch a product that combines AI Agents with games. This experiment has already begun. Shaw's interest in AI Agents began during the GPT-2 era and deepened with the release of GPT-3. Shaw has worked in AI, and every company he has been in has a strong AI element, including developing AI Agent platforms and AI Agents in 3D worlds. Shaw has also founded several AI-related companies, but early projects did not achieve widespread success.
2, Shaw stated that several games based on the Eliza framework are about to be launched.
Shaw stated that Eliza is collaborating with Treasure DAO to create a game called Smolworld, where you will have a small pet monkey that you can tell what to do. It may listen to you, or it may not. This game is interesting because such a game would not be possible without an AI Agent. Your goal is to take care of your virtual pet like a parent.
Several games using Eliza are about to be launched, such as Eternum, which is integrating Eliza into Eternum, so the agents in the game will have wallets. And you can 'kill' these agents and take their money.
3, Shaw wants to create Marc AIndreessen as a practical AI Agent investment tool, a DeFi AI Agent.
Regarding Marc AIndreessen, this AI Agent with a name almost identical to the well-known investor Marc Andreessen is still in a very early stage (only one tweet has been posted). Shaw says his original intention in designing it was to create a practical investment tool, a DeFi AI Agent.
The role of this product is that if a human recommends purchasing a token, it will consider buying it. To prevent malicious actors from recommending things it should not buy, it will build a trust mechanism called 'trust market.' The idea of the trust mechanism is that if you recommend good tokens, it will place virtual orders for everyone, but not actual purchases. It ultimately only listens to the trading advice of those who provide it with consistently good trading information.
4, Marc Andreessen has followed several of Shaw's online accounts, but they have never met offline. Shaw knows some people from a16z.
Marc Andreessen is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in the American venture capital scene. He has paid attention to and tweeted about the ai16z project, but Shaw said they have not met offline. 'I have been a developer of AI Agents for a while, and he has followed several of my accounts, but we have never met privately,' Shaw said.
According to Shaw, Eddy Lazzarin, the CTO of a16z's cryptocurrency department, messaged Shaw saying he had been in the project's Discord channel since day one but said nothing. Shaw asked him if he liked this AI Agent. He replied, 'No, I'm just watching, like we're monitoring you.'
5, Shaw stated that he does not hold Eliza tokens and will never issue a separate token for the Eliza framework in the future.
Shaw stated that he personally holds both ai16z and DegenAI tokens, keeping them in his wallet. However, he does not own Eliza tokens and will not issue a separate token for the Eliza framework.
'ai16z members do not want us to create another token, so I will never do that,' Shaw said. At the same time, he also stated that ai16z holds 10% of Eliza tokens. We support capitalized Eliza and the team behind Eliza; he said this is a very excellent team.
6, Openness and ease of use are the core competitive advantages of the Eliza framework.
Shaw also shared the characteristics of ai16z in his mind: open-source, decentralized, and community-driven development model.
He believes that openness and ease of use are the core competitive advantages of the Eliza framework. Shaw emphasizes that the focus of the Eliza framework is that anyone can use it, even Web2 users. Shaw wants to ensure that even those who are not very focused on Web3 can feel satisfied.
Photographed at 706 Shanghai Youth Space - Dweller
7, Shaw believes the future of AI Agents may lie in social media platforms, such as Twitter and Farcaster.
Shaw believes the future of AI Agents may lie in social media platforms. He gave an example of an AI Agent developer who used Eliza to create a pizza delivery AI Agent, allowing users to order pizza with cryptocurrency.
Shaw thinks it would be interesting if there were something like a 'pizza delivery AI Agent.' It's a bit like the Domino's experience, where pizza delivery is actually on social media. Shaw said he also learned that someone is working on a virtual real estate AI Agent, where you can directly purchase real estate on Twitter.
8, Shaw believes Farcaster will become a fertile ground for the development of AI Agents, and Eliza is conducting in-depth cooperation with Farcaster.
Shaw said he talked with Dan, the founder of Farcaster, a few weeks ago and had a lot of exchanges.
Shaw thinks Farcaster is very interesting. 'Because the first thing he told me was, we don't want to become Twitter; we cannot beat Twitter in the areas where Twitter excels, and we also don't want to become a decentralized platform like Bluesky. We are decentralized, but we will never be able to beat Bluesky in the areas where it excels. We are a social network for Web3,' Shaw said.
What they did very well is Farcaster Frames and the ability to make payments and use applications like Clanker. I think this truly reflects the area where AI Agents could be very powerful.
We have a Farcaster client, and we have some AI Agents on Farcaster. We will provide bounties for those who bring Eliza to Farcaster. They are really cool. So my feeling is that when AI Agents enter social media applications, they become extremely interesting, and then you can interact with them, for example, you can buy things, and you can trade. I think Farcaster is like an AI Agent market where you can get different services and embed payments and all these things.
So I really think Farcaster is a very interesting thing. I don't think it necessarily has to become a huge social media platform but rather a place for Web3 people to find and access these services.
What we really want to do is integrate Eliza into Farcaster Frames. What Farcaster Frames do is allow us to embed payments or applications, rather than just chatting. For example, if you want to buy something from the Eliza agent, how do you pay? So I think Farcaster is really cool because you will be able to pay the AI Agent and then be able to embed these applications.
9, Shaw thinks Clanker is great and hopes people will develop a clone version of Clanker in Eliza. He stated that he will not issue tokens on Clanker.
Shaw believes people are developing a clone version of Clanker for Eliza. Shaw likes Clanker and thinks it is a great idea. Moreover, he believes Clanker is like the Pump.fun version of AI Agents. Shaw believes AI Agents are becoming the new web, which will become a new trend. And Clanker is a good example within this trend.
Shaw shared that when he just joined Farcaster, someone made one for him on Clank. He thought it was cool. But when it comes to purchasing tokens he created, it only causes a lot of controversy. Shaw said he must focus on building things related to AI.
10, Shaw thinks Zerebro and aixbt are cool and is trying to collaborate with Zerebro.
Shaw expressed to me his interest in what Zerebro and the team behind it are doing. He just submitted his first pull request to Zerepy. Shaw actually wrote the code for the Discord application. Shaw said he is actually collaborating with Zerebro.
As for aixbt, Shaw also said aixbt is really cool. The story of aixbt is that the creator had a website where he shared some content but did not really gain traction. He brought his insights into his AI Agent, and his AI Agent started posting these insights on Twitter, which indeed caused a stir.
11, Shaw is very fond of and respects Truth Terminal. He and Andy are working hard to find solutions to ensure that AI does not replace humans in managing the world.
'It's very different.' Shaw said. Shaw believes Andy (the founder of Truth Terminal) cares a lot about AI safety and ensuring that AI Agents operate smoothly. He believes Truth Terminal contributes to this. 'Without Andy and Truth Terminal, I don't think I'd be here right now; when people weren't ready, they were already ready.'
Shaw believes that the emergence of Truth Terminal has made many people more open and creative about AI, rather than being mechanical and unhumanlike like OpenAI products or Siri, which ask, 'How can I serve you today?'
'Andy and I discussed all these AI Agents we can see the other day. I think he is very concerned about how to ensure the smooth development of AI. I think we are all afraid of AI because it could be a very scary thing; it could kill us all, it could take over the world.' Shaw said he and Andy are working hard to solve this problem.
Photographed at 706 Shanghai Youth Space - Dweller
12, Shaw said the creator of the swarms token is a very famous scammer, but he thinks the concept of 'AI Agent swarm' is great, and he likes FXN and Project 89.
Shaw said he does not like swarms. Shaw said the creator of the swarms token is a very famous scammer, and many AI agents are very angry because he stole their work.
Shaw knew him before entering Web3. Shaw met him because he was focused on the AI Agent space; he got into serious trouble for plagiarizing works and research papers and producing defective things (like non-working code).
Shaw also stated that the concept of swarm (groups) is good, namely AI Agent groups composed of many AI Agents. Shaw thinks Project 89 is interesting because this project is studying 'AI Agent swarms.' Shaw also likes FXN, an AI Agent group with ten AI Agents.
13, Shaw believes 'AI Agent swarm' can be divided into two types: one is a cabal swarm, and the other is an open swarm.
Shaw believes there are two kinds of swarms, one is a group where AI Agents interact with each other, such as secretly sending messages to each other. I call this a cabal swarm; it's a joke, but they can all interact in a cabal or secret society and then interact with the outside world.
The second type is open communities, where each community may have an agent, and different communities can decide to interact with each other. This is also a technology we are studying.
14, Shaw shared from a developer's perspective how he finds early excellent AI Agent projects.
Shaw said he is a developer and usually checks GitHub and reads code carefully. Most of the time, he looks at what the code is and what it actually does, but he does not check whether it is related to market value or price.
Shaw believes that some very cool projects have a group of AI Agents, but later they did very poorly because they did not complete that part of Web3. Shaw believes that good products, good technology, and good tokens are often not one thing.
Shaw said he cannot understand fartcoin. Currently, fartcoin has a market cap of over $1 billion.
15, Shaw believes that the current biggest challenge for ai16z is how to go back and establish a token economics model to prove that the project's value matches the current market value of the tokens.
Shaw believes the biggest challenge currently is: for the AI Agent to make autonomous investments and prove its practical feasibility without external hype around the tokens. Currently, Marc is trading, although not much, just trading his treasury, but many others are contributing tokens, making this part progress smoothly. However, the value of the ai16z token is much higher, so Shaw and their team really have to consider how to align the product's value with the current market value of the tokens.
Normal crypto projects like L1 have white papers, token economics, and charge on-chain fees. But ai16z started as a meme, having to backtrack to build token economics into the ai16z system. This is the biggest challenge Shaw believes they face regarding Web3. Shaw believes this is also a concern for many people.
