Shaw talked about ten potential AI Agent projects in his mind.

Article author: Zhou Zhou

Source: Foresight News

On December 22, 2024, in the afternoon, ai16z founder Shaw and his wife Jill landed in Shanghai. That evening, I and members of the 706 community (one of the largest youth communities in China), along with developers and investors from the crypto community, hosted a welcoming dinner for him. The following day, I invited Shaw to my home for a discussion before heading to a restaurant for a meal, and then took Shaw to his first meetup venue in China. One could say I witnessed Shaw's itinerary in Shanghai fairly comprehensively.

Shaw generously shared with us the next focus of work for ai16z and Eliza during this process, describing the future landscape of AI Agents and providing a concrete analysis and evaluation of a dozen well-known AI Agent projects currently, which allowed me and the other attendees of the gathering to gain a deeper understanding of the AI Agent sector.

Looking back, Shaw and his founding of ai16z have only been famous in the industry for about a month. As a founder of a startup project, he has gained extensive and eager attention from many investors, developers, and media in the crypto industry. Why is that? I think it may relate to the explosive popularity of AI Agents in the crypto industry, and ai16z happens to be one of the core projects leading this AI Agent meme narrative wave.

The narrative of crypto AI Agents, although just a month old, is already considered one of the hottest topics in current discussions in the crypto industry, with many industry practitioners asserting that AI Agents will become one of the main narratives of this crypto cycle. ai16z is one of the most well-known projects in this regard, having established the world's first VC AI Agent—ai16z DAO, the first well-known open-source AI Agent crypto framework—Eliza, and has garnered the attention and recognition of Marc Andreessen, the founder of the well-known American venture capital firm a16z. Consequently, the token of ai16z reached a market value of one billion dollars within a month, and related tokens like DegenAI, Eliza, aiPool, etc., have also received widespread attention from the community.

As this important narrative was born, crypto practitioners eagerly wanted to know the real situation of the current AI Agent sector. Is it a bubble or a real application? What are the latest developments in the U.S., and what will be the next developments of AI Agents in the crypto industry? Therefore, I summarized fifteen important pieces of information from my communication with Shaw over the past two days, including his observations and evaluations of ten different AI Agent projects.

1. Shaw is an AI Agent serial entrepreneur living in San Francisco, and he was once a game developer.

Regarding Shaw's work and life background, Shaw stated that he lives in San Francisco, initially as a game developer, and is now launching products that integrate AI Agents with games; this experiment has already begun. Shaw's focus on AI Agents began during the GPT-2 era and deepened with the release of GPT-3. Shaw works in the AI field, and every company he has been part of has strong AI elements, 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 states that Eliza is collaborating with Treasure DAO to create a game called Smolworld, where you will have a pet monkey that you can tell what to do. It may listen to you, or it may not. This game is interesting because without an AI Agent, such a game would not be possible. 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 so that agents in the game will have wallets. And you can 'kill' these agents and take their money.

3. Shaw wants to build Marc Andreessen into a practical AI Agent investment tool, a DeFi AI Agent.

Regarding Marc Andreessen, this AI Agent almost shares the same name as the renowned investor Marc Andreessen; currently, this project is still in a very early stage (only tweeted once). Shaw said his original intention was to create it as a practical investment tool, a DeFi AI Agent.

The purpose of this product is that if a human recommends purchasing a token, it will consider buying it. To prevent malicious actors from recommending things that should not be purchased, 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 real purchases. It ultimately only listens to trading advice from those who provide consistently good trading information.

4. Marc Andreessen 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 American venture capital, he has paid attention to and retweeted the ai16z project, but Shaw said they have not met offline. 'I have been an AI Agent developer for some time; he has followed several of my accounts, but we have never met privately,' Shaw said.

According to Shaw, the CTO of a16z's cryptocurrency department, Eddy Lazzarin, messaged Shaw, saying he had been in the project's Discord channel since day one but hadn't said anything. Shaw asked him if he liked this AI Agent. He said no, I’m just watching, like we’re monitoring you.

5. Shaw stated that he does not hold Eliza tokens and will never issue an independent token for the Eliza framework in the future.

Shaw stated he personally holds both ai16z and DegenAI tokens and keeps them in his wallet. However, he does not own Eliza tokens and will not issue an independent token for the Eliza framework.

'The ai16z members do not wish for us to create another token, so I will never do that,' Shaw said. At the same time, he also stated that ai16z owns 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 emphasized that the focus of the Eliza framework is that anyone can use it, even those in Web2. Shaw wants to ensure that even those who are not very focused on Web3 can feel satisfied.

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 gives an example of an AI Agent developer using Eliza to create a pizza delivery AI Agent, so that users can order pizza with cryptocurrency.

Shaw believes it would be interesting to have something like a 'pizza delivery AI Agent'. This is somewhat like the Domino’s experience, such as pizza delivery, which is actually all on social media. Shaw said he also learned that someone is working on a virtual real estate AI Agent, and 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 finds Farcaster very interesting. 'Because the first thing it told me is that 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 do very well is Farcaster Frames and the ability to make payments and use applications like Clanker, which I think really reflects the potentially powerful domain of AI Agents.

We have a Farcaster client, and we have some AI Agents on Farcaster. We will offer bounties to those who bring Eliza to Farcaster. They are really cool. So my feeling is that when AI Agents enter social media applications, they become very interesting, and then you can interact with them, like you can buy things, you can trade. I think Farcaster is like a marketplace for AI Agents where you can obtain different services, and you can embed payments and all these things within it.

So I really think Farcaster is a very interesting thing; I believe it doesn't necessarily have 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 an Eliza agent, how do you pay? So I think Farcaster is really cool because you will be able to pay AI Agents and then be able to embed these applications.

9. Shaw thinks Clanker is great and hopes people will develop a clone version of Clanker for Eliza; he stated he won't issue a token on Clanker.

Shaw believes people are developing a clone of Clanker for Eliza, which Shaw likes and thinks is a great idea. He also thinks that Clanker is like the Pump.fun version of AI Agent. Shaw believes AI Agent is becoming a new network that will be a new trend. Clanker is a great example of this trend.

Shaw shared that when he just joined Farcaster, someone made one for him on Clank. He thought that was cool. But when buying tokens he created himself, it only causes a lot of controversy. Shaw said he has to focus on building things related to AI.

10. Shaw thinks Zerebro and aixbt are cool and is trying to collaborate with Zerebro.

Shaw expressed his interest in what Zerebro and the team behind it are doing. He just submitted his first pull request to Zerepy. Shaw has actually written code for the Discord application. Shaw said he is indeed collaborating with Zerebro.

As for aixbt, Shaw also said aixbt is really cool, and the story of aixbt is that the creator had a website where he shared some content but did not gain real traction. He brought his insights into his AI Agent, and his AI Agent started posting these insights on Twitter, which indeed caused a sensation.

11. Shaw really likes and admires Truth Terminal; he and Andy are working hard to find solutions so that AI does not replace humans in managing the world.

'It is very different,' Shaw said. Shaw believes Andy (the founder of Truth Terminal) cares a lot about AI safety and ensures that AI Agents run smoothly; he believes Truth Terminal contributes to this. 'Without Andy and Truth Terminal, I don’t think I would be here now; when people were not ready, they were already prepared.'

Shaw believes the emergence of Truth Terminal has made many people more open and creative about AI, rather than being mechanical and lacking humanity like OpenAI's products or Siri, where they ask, 'What service can I provide for you today?'

'Andy and I discussed all these AI Agents we can see right now a few days ago. I think he cares a lot about ensuring 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 both working hard to solve this problem.

12. Shaw said the creator of the swarms token is a very famous scammer, but he thinks the concept of 'AI Agent swarm' is good; he likes FXN and Project 89.

Shaw said he does not like swarms. Shaw mentioned that he knows the creator of the swarms token, who 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 of his focus on the AI Agent space; he got into serious trouble for plagiarizing works and research papers and creating flawed items (like non-working code).

Shaw also stated that the concept of swarms is good, which consists of many AI Agents forming an AI Agent swarm. Shaw finds Project 89 very interesting because this project is researching 'AI Agent swarms'. Shaw also likes FXN, an AI Agent swarm with ten AI Agents.

13. Shaw believes the 'AI Agent swarm' can be divided into two types: one is a cabal swarm, and the other is an open swarm.

Shaw thinks there are two types of groups; one is groups where AI Agents interact with each other, for example, they secretly send messages to each other. I call it a cabal, which is a joke, but they are all in a cabal or secret group, can interact, and then they can interact with the outside world.

The second type is open groups, where each community may have an agent, and different communities can decide to allow them to interact with each other. This is also a technology we are researching.

14. From a developer's perspective, Shaw shared how he finds early excellent AI Agent projects.

Shaw said he is a developer and usually checks GitHub and reads the code carefully. Most of the time, he looks at what the code is and what it is actually doing, but he does not check whether it has any correlation with market value or price.

Shaw believes some very cool projects have a group of AI Agents, but later they did very poorly because they did not complete the Web3 part. Shaw believes that good products, good technology, and good tokens are often not one thing.

Shaw says he can't understand fartcoin. Currently, fartcoin has a market value of over one billion dollars.

15. Shaw believes the biggest challenge for ai16z currently is how to step back and establish a set of token economic models to prove the project's value matches the current token market value.

Shaw believes the biggest challenge currently is: for the AI Agent to make autonomous investments and prove its practicality without the need for 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 need to consider how to make the product's value match the current token market value.

Normal crypto projects like L1 have white papers, token economics, and charge on-chain fees. But ai16z started as a meme and had to take a step back to build token economics into the ai16z system. This is what Shaw thinks is their biggest challenge in Web3. Shaw believes this is also a concern for many people.