Author: Weilin, PANews
To get closer to the community, Shaw, who had been working quietly behind the scenes on technology, stepped into the spotlight. In late December, during the most important overseas holiday—Christmas—Shaw chose to come to China to meet with community developers alongside his wife. From Shanghai to Beijing and then to Hong Kong, Shaw's schedule was very tight, and at every event, he was lined up for questions from everyone.
As the hottest AI agent project, ai16z's token market value has exceeded $1 billion. ai16z's core ElizaOS is a powerful multi-agent simulation framework designed to create, deploy, and manage autonomous AI agents. It is built using TypeScript and can interact across multiple platforms. Many projects have already been developed based on this highly praised open-source framework.
On December 26, at the ai16z community exchange event held in Beijing, PANews held an in-depth dialogue with Shaw, the founder of ai16z and the creator of ElizaOS, discussing the project's original intention, progress, future development direction, and views on the future of AI Agents.
Shaw said he is not a money-loving person, but his development work aims to provide ordinary people with investment opportunities, allowing the crypto ecosystem to transition from speculative to generative, moving away from gambling-like betting and instead investing in things that can genuinely expand the pie.
Regarding project progress, ai16z will soon announce the partner list to improve transparency, and a new proposal for ai16z token economics will be released around January 1. Shaw believes that in response to how to deal with AI-hosted worlds, people should have their own data and models, and high decentralization is key.
The founding intention of ai16z: to give ordinary people the opportunity to become investors.
In an interview, Shaw candidly stated that the birth of ai16z stems from observing 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. Ordinary people have almost no channels to access these opportunities.'
Shaw believes that crypto ecosystems like Solana can transition from speculative to generative, moving away from gambling-like bets on this token or that token, and instead investing in things that can genuinely expand the pie. Just like companies and software. For instance, 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 something of great value. Shaw hopes that similar opportunities can be widely used by ordinary people and communities.
He recalled the project's early stage: '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 combine it together. So we immediately started working on it after that lunch.'
Latest updates: to announce the partner list, new proposals for ai16z token economics.
As the market value of ai16z's token exceeds $1 billion, Shaw revealed a series of exciting project updates. In the short term, Shaw believes that many people in the crypto space do not understand DeFi and do not know how to make their funds earn more returns like banks or other financial institutions. ai16z hopes to build a bridge connecting DeFi with ordinary users.
Therefore, ai16z is developing some tools, such as an automatic liquidity pool (LP) Agent. This agent can automatically manage liquidity pools for users, helping them earn income. The autonomous investor tool developed by ai16z allows the community to invest in projects they believe in. This autonomous investor is not just decided by AI on what to invest in, but is collectively decided by the community, with AI listening to everyone's opinions and organizing them into an investment argument, then making decisions as a representative of the community. ai16z is interested in how AI can solve many coordination and communication issues within DAOs and communities, thereby helping them make decisions together.
In addition, Shaw stated that the project parties will officially announce all partner lists to improve project transparency and help the community better understand the cooperation relationships and their specific scope. Regarding token economics, in response to previous industry insiders' comments about unclear token economics, ai16z will announce a new token economics proposal around January 1. This proposal will be jointly designed by professionals from multiple teams and will include LP pairing mechanisms and DeFi functionality integration. Additionally, the project party revealed they have acquired a Launchpad company, which will be used for the official release of AI agents in the future.
Meanwhile, the recent AI Pool project, which Shaw has repeatedly supported on social media, has attracted market attention. Shaw stated that AI Pool is created by partner Skely; therefore, it is primarily his project, but it is built on our ElizaOS technology. It showcases a process similar to pump.fun, but this process occurs on social media in a more equitable way, so users do not need to go elsewhere. It also demonstrates a truly autonomous agent, which is completely self-governing—ai16z has no control over it, nor can he access the private keys. Funds cannot be withdrawn, and it cannot be manipulated; it operates autonomously.
ai16z Dev Meetup Beijing event site facing competition from Zerebro and ARC, admitting they are great complements.
Shaw stated that projects like ARC (written in Rust) and Zerepy (written in Python) complement ai16z's work on Eliza OS very well. 'I know Swarm's reputation; they are known for stealing the work of notable researchers and exerting influence in a practically ineffective way. Therefore, I would not list it here. But for any genuine open-source projects and real developers who enjoy collaboration, I am very willing to work with them. This week I contributed to Zerepy. We also collaborate with Zerebro; although people consider it our biggest competitor, in reality, we are partners.'
Currently, DeFi, gaming, and social media are the three main pillars of ai16z's work. Shaw believes that social media helps gain attention and develop quickly; DeFi provides the greatest value to ordinary users, helping them earn returns more safely; gaming also attracts a lot of interest. Currently, Treasure DAO's Smolworld and Loot Realms' Eternum are both using Eliza technology for development. Although these three are the most obvious directions, more fields may emerge in the future.
In summary, Shaw's advice to project parties and users is that anything that can help users earn money, save costs, or improve their lives will surely stand out. 'I feel that simply promoting a token, like spamming messages on Twitter, may not be as important as it used to be, especially as agents increase. The focus will be more 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 web access onto social platforms, overall making the user experience simpler.'
Future trends: different stages of AI agents and how to respond to AI takeover of the world.
Currently, AI agents have undergone different stages of development, from the initial meme to expansion into social media, then to infrastructure and investment analysis. In Shaw's view, the biggest trend he currently sees is that websites are migrating to social media.
All the purposes people previously visited websites for can now potentially be achieved through agents on social media. Therefore, this trend indicates that people are looking for ways to integrate applications directly into social media. He mentioned that he had earlier communicated with someone developing a travel booking agent, and they are also collaborating with someone developing a real estate booking system. A very obvious DeFi example is Clanker, which is developed for Forecaster. I think this is a great example of this trend, where you directly place the model of pump.fun onto social media, forming a social minting experience that is more interesting, self-promoting, and self-marketing, and users can use the application without leaving the social platform. I believe there will be thousands of applications following this trend in the future.
When discussing the future, Shaw emphasized that diversity and high decentralization are key to preventing AI from taking over the world. He stated that decentralization can ensure that each community has complete control over its agents and can effectively respond to the risks of AI takeover.
I believe the most important thing is diversity, allowing AI agents to be very different from each other. They use different models, strategies, and approaches, built by different teams with different incentive mechanisms, creating a stronger network, making it very difficult for any single AI to take over. A very important point is that all of this must be highly decentralized, and we must have our own data and models, with each community being able to completely control its own agents. Thus, in the event of some AI takeover, this AI would have to contend with many other AIs. There shouldn't just be one super-intelligent AI, but there should be many super-intelligent AIs, making it harder for any one AI to gain an advantage.
