Author: Weilin, PANews
To get closer to the community, Shaw, who had previously been working behind the scenes focusing on technology, stepped into the spotlight. In late December, during the overseas holiday season—Christmas—Shaw and his wife chose to come to China to meet with community developers. From Shanghai to Beijing and then to Hong Kong, Shaw's schedule was tight, and at every event, he was lined up with questions from everyone.
As the hottest AI agent project, ai16z's token market capitalization has exceeded $1 billion. The core ElizaOS of ai16z is a powerful multi-agent simulation framework designed to create, deploy, and manage autonomous AI agents, built using TypeScript, capable of interacting across multiple platforms. Many projects have already been developed based on this highly regarded open-source framework.
On December 26, at an ai16z community exchange event held in Beijing, PANews engaged in an in-depth dialogue with Shaw, the founder of ai16z and 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-oriented 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.
In terms of project progress, ai16z will soon announce the list of partners to increase transparency, with a new proposal for ai16z token economics to be announced around January 1st. Shaw believes that in response to how to cope with the AI-hosted world, people should own their 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 admitted that the birth of ai16z stemmed from observations of 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 virtually no access to these opportunities."
Shaw believes that crypto ecosystems like Solana can transition from speculative to generative, moving away from gambling-like betting 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 these other large venture capital firms invest in software companies, they also incorporate them into their networks, driving value realization. They make money because they create highly valuable things. Shaw hopes similar opportunities can be widely utilized by ordinary people and communities.
He recalled the initial stage of the project: "I collaborated with baoskee from daos.fun. We had lunch together, and at that time I said I wanted to create something like an AI version of a16z. He said, then just call it ai16z, and combine it. So we started working on it immediately after that lunch."
Latest progress: Partnership list will be announced, new proposal for ai16z token economics.
With ai16z's token market capitalization exceeding $1 billion, Shaw revealed a series of exciting project dynamics. In the short term, Shaw believes that many people in the crypto space currently do not understand DeFi, nor do they know how to use funds in their wallets to earn more like banks or other financial institutions. ai16z hopes to build a bridge connecting DeFi and 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 self-investor tool developed by ai16z allows the community to invest in projects they believe in. This self-investor is not solely determined by AI but is collectively decided by the community, where AI listens to everyone's opinions, organizes them into an investment argument, and then makes decisions as a representative of the community. ai16z is interested in how AI can solve many coordination and communication issues within DAOs and communities to help them make decisions together.
In addition, Shaw stated that the project party will officially announce all partner lists to enhance project transparency, helping the community better understand the cooperation relationships and their specific scope. Regarding token economics, in response to the previous industry's criticism of unclear token economics, ai16z will announce a new proposal for token economics around January 1st. This proposal will be designed by professionals from multiple teams and will include LP pairing mechanisms, DeFi functionality integration, and more. Additionally, the project party revealed that they have acquired a Launchpad company, which will be used for the official release of AI agents in the future.
Meanwhile, the recent support for the AI Pool project by Shaw on social media has attracted market attention. Shaw stated that the AI Pool was created by partner Skely, so it is primarily his project, but it is built on our ElizaOS technology. It demonstrates a process similar to pump.fun, but this process occurs in a fairer way on social media, so users do not need to go elsewhere. It also showcases a truly autonomous agent, which operates completely independently—ai16z has no control over it, and it cannot access private keys. Funds cannot be withdrawn, and it cannot be manipulated; it runs autonomously.
Facing competition from Zerebro and ARC, it admits that they are great complements.
Shaw stated that projects like ARC (written in Rust) and Zerepy (written in Python) are great complements to ai16z's work on Eliza OS. "I know the reputation of Swarm; they are known for stealing the work of famous researchers and exerting influence in a practically ineffective way. Therefore, I will not include it on this list. But I am very willing to collaborate with any truly open-source projects and real developers who enjoy collaboration. This week I contributed to Zerepy. We are also collaborating with Zerebro; although people think it is our biggest competitor, in reality, we are partners."
Currently, DeFi, gaming, and social media are the three pillars of ai16z's work. Shaw believes that social media helps gain attention and rapid development; DeFi provides maximum value for ordinary users, helping them earn safely; and gaming also attracts a lot of interest. Currently, Treasure DAO's Smolworld and Loot Realms' Eternum are developing using Eliza technology. 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 helps users make money, save expenses, or improve their lives will surely stand out. "I feel that merely promoting a token, like posting a lot of information on Twitter and spamming, may not be as important as before, especially as agents become more numerous. The focus will shift more to what this agent can do and what it can do for me. So, we should focus on lowering the barriers to using things like financial products and bringing applications that previously required website access onto social platforms, overall simplifying the user experience."
Future trends: Different stages of AI agents and how to cope with an AI takeover of the world.
Currently, AI agents have undergone different development stages, from the initial meme to expansion into social, and then to infrastructure and investment analysis. In Shaw's view, the biggest trend he sees now is that websites are migrating towards social media.
All the purposes for which people used to visit websites can now potentially be achieved through agents on social media. Therefore, this trend indicates that people are looking for ways to directly integrate applications into social media. He mentioned having previously communicated with someone developing a travel booking agent, and we are also collaborating with someone developing a real estate booking system. A clear DeFi example is Clanker, which is being developed for Forecaster. I think this is a great example of this trend, where you take the model of pump.fun and place it directly on social media, creating a social minting experience that is more engaging, self-promoting, and self-marketing, allowing users to use the application without leaving the social platform. I believe that in the future, there will be thousands of applications following this trend.
Speaking of the future, Shaw emphasized that diversity and high decentralization are key to preventing an AI takeover of 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 think the most important thing is diversity, making AI agents very different from each other. They use different models, strategies, and methods, built by different teams with different incentive mechanisms, which can create a stronger network that makes it very difficult for any single AI to take over. It is crucial that all of this is highly decentralized, and we need to own our own data and models, with each community able to fully control its own agents. That way, in the event of some AI takeover, this AI would have to contend with many other AIs. There should not be just one super-intelligent AI, but many super-intelligent AIs, making it much more difficult for any one AI to gain an advantage."
