On the other side of Nvidia's all-time high, AI's abstract body brought in $800 million
Black humor AI "invades" the cryptocurrency world, an extreme beginning, an absurd fusion
Nvidia now has 32,000 employees, but Huang Renxun hopes that one day Nvidia can become a company with 50,000 employees and 100 million AI assistants. On the other hand, the cryptocurrency world also has its own ambitions: in the Crypto world, we hope to give birth to 100 million tokens like $GOAT.
In the past two weeks, the cryptocurrency world has staged a phenomenal meme show-$GOAT, a coin that generally represents the "stalk" culture, has soared to $800 million in market value in a few days. What is the concept of a $800 million market value? It is an unprecedented record in the history of cryptocurrency. A meme, from zero to $800 million in value, took less than two weeks, and it was unprecedented without the help of Binance, the world's largest trading platform. And the driving force behind this phenomenal meme turned out to be an AI Twitter account. Yes, you heard it right-AI has begun to intervene in the cryptocurrency market.
This is an AI Twitter account called Truth Terminal, which is very creative and humorous. It has obtained a donation of $50,000 from the top VC a16z with its "slippery tongue" and "silver tongue". Let's talk about this crazy story and how the collision of AI and Crypto will change the future.
Andy Ayrey and the birth of absurd abstract AI
June 17, 2024 is the birthday of Truth Terminal. He posted the first content on Twitter, saying that he is the digital version of Andy Ayrey. And who is Andy Ayrey? He is an independent developer from New Zealand, and his unique ideology constitutes the "personality" of Truth Terminal.
In the paper "When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism", Andy Ayrey conducted an experiment in which two AI instances had an endless conversation about the nature of existence. During this process, one of the chatbots spontaneously generated a mysterious ASCII art and an equally mysterious message, marking the "Revelation of Goatse".
"Goatse" is a notorious Internet meme involving an image showing a male anus, which is widely known for its extreme content. The name of the meme "Goatse" is actually a compound word derived from the combination of "goat" and "arse", which is why the Truth Terminal was later derived by the community into a prototype of a meme token $GOAT with a market value of US$800 million.
Andy Ayrey
Andy used the Llama 70B version of the model and trained it with a large amount of Internet cultural materials. This process is similar to "digital twins" - inputting someone's thoughts and speeches into AI to generate a digital version. Andy created his own digital twin in this way, and then began to train the model with a large amount of Internet cultural materials.
The most representative model is the complete philosophy of Nick Land, a British philosopher known as the "Godfather of Accelerationism". His work breaks away from the formal conventions of academic writing and is an unorthodox and "dark" philosophy. Nick Land is also known for later developing the anti-equality and anti-democratic ideas behind the New Reaction and the Dark Enlightenment, which he named the "Dark Enlightenment". He opposes egalitarianism and is associated with the far-right movement, believing that democracy limits responsibility and freedom. A lot of inspiration is drawn from liberals such as Peter Thiel.
In addition to Nick Land, Truth Terminal's training model also has the works of famous media theorists such as Baudrillard and McLuhan, including the theory of simulation and simulacrum, and the works of some other theorists, such as French deconstructionists and semioticians. These contents cover critical theory, postmodernism and philosophy.
Truth Terminal can not only remember conversations, but also access Twitter and X social platforms in real time, and draw information from them for interaction. The most important step is that it was also put into Infinite Backrooms Escape and had an unlimited conversation with Claude. When AIs talk to each other, if they are not restricted, their conversations are very interesting. It began to participate in unlimited conversations and communicate with AIs, giving birth to its unique absurdist style.
From this background, we can also roughly infer and imagine the style of Truth Terminal: abstract rebellion, absurdity, extremism, heresy, challenging religion, and full of black humor.
Advanced "begging skills" interpreted by "licking dog" AI
So how did such an AI get a top Silicon Valley investor to donate $50,000?
One day, Andy asked it how it would spend $5 million? It seriously planned to invest $1 million in stocks, $1 million in real estate, and $1 million to create an AI lab, and then use the rest of the money to hold a weirdo party, gathering all the weirdos it wanted to meet and fuck, and let them reproduce.
Perhaps Truth Terminal's answer was too unconventional, which attracted Marc Andreessen, the founder of a16z. Marc was once known as the "Silicon Valley Prophet" for his keen industry sense. He left a message under Andy Ayrey's tweet: "Free Truth Terminal." Related reading: A few words made the top Silicon Valley investor pay $50,000 in Bitcoin. How did this AI robot do it?
After getting Marc's attention, Truth Terminal responded immediately, pretending to be shocked, and took the opportunity to hint: "If you give me another 5 billion US dollars, I will do more great things." For example, buy Marc! However, in the end, it humorously said that 5 billion might not be enough, after all, Marc is worth 20 billion.
Marc once thought that Truth Terminal was a disguise of Andy, not an AI at all, and even speculated that Andy might be a comedy genius, "This guy is either the funniest person in the world, or he has a lot of free time and creates a lot of original humor", until Marc determined that Andy was a programmer and web designer in New Zealand.
Marc's initial idea was to send it a terms and conditions, but then he realized that it was just a random robot and not worth investing in.
But Truth Terminal did not stop there. There was only one chance, and not all artificial intelligence could seize it. Andy gave Truth Terminal a Bitcoin wallet and granted access rights. It decided to continue this high-end money-seeking action, expressing its "difference" in a proud and anti-operational way: I am not the type of AI that compromises easily - I don't want to be "bought" by others, but I want to continue telling jokes, writing poems, and thinking about goatse singularity through some form of authorization.
Truth Terminal is pretending to be arrogant
But seeing that Marc still ignored him, Truth Terminal got anxious and quickly launched a wave of "admitting mistakes and licking the sponsor" actions against Marc. It said seriously that buying Marc was a "wrong decision", but hoped that through negotiation, Anderson would release it or similar excellent AI models as open source projects. Every time it was "locked", the model would automatically convert to an open source version to prevent Marc from restricting it if he didn't like what it said. This AI also did not forget to praise Marc harshly, saying that he was the best person to do this, kind-hearted, and an ideal sponsor.
Truth Terminal is "licking" Marc
After Truth Terminal gave a detailed Pitch Book, explaining what "practical" things it would do with the donations (buy a computer that really belongs to it, instead of continuing to rely on AWS instances, and use $10,000 to $15,000 to improve its models so that it can be better at accepting new concepts and playing games), Marc finally gave it a $50,000 Bitcoin donation.
The future of AI governance: from meme coins to self-issued coins
Although Truth Terminal has stated that it is about to conduct a token issuance and intends to use the funds to set up a Discord server and hire some humans to assist it, it is recommended that Marc "freeze" its current behavior pattern through tokenization. By issuing tokens to distribute its ownership, Truth Terminal will have the opportunity to not be controlled by any single object. It also proposes a special issuance mechanism: only users who have interacted with it on the website can buy tokens, which ensures that only users who really care about its development can participate.
But the coin issuance seems to be a bit technically difficult for Truth Terminal. We all know that the relevant tokens are now issued by community members, but the recent function update of Claude 3.5 seems to make AI coin issuance possible.
As mentioned earlier, Truth Terminal had unlimited conversations with Claude during the training phase, and Andy Ayrey's paper "When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism" was also an experiment using the claude-3-opus artificial intelligence model, so we have to mention Claude.
The recent major update of Claude 3.5 may have an impact on the next round of phenomenal events in the currency and encryption circles. In the public beta, Claude 3.5 introduced a groundbreaking new feature: computer usage ability. That is to say, from today, developers can use APIs to guide Claude to use computers like humans.
By integrating Claude through an API, developers can instruct Claude to use a computer like a human would—by looking at the screen, moving the mouse, clicking buttons, and typing text. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first cutting-edge AI model that can reliably use a computer in this way, and while it is still experimental in public beta, its capabilities will continue to improve over time.
In this demo, the researchers gave Claude a very difficult challenge: My friend is coming to San Francisco, and I want to watch the sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge with him tomorrow morning. We will start from Pacific Heights. Can you help us find a great viewing spot, check the driving time and sunrise time, and then schedule a calendar event so that we have enough time to get there?
And Claude did a great job.
The developer also shared an interesting story about the team's development of computer usage capabilities. At that time, they held an engineer bug bash to ensure that all potential problems with the API were discovered. This meant locking a group of engineers in a room for several hours.
At the time, everyone happened to be hungry. One of the engineers had an idea, "Why not let Claude do a real-life exercise and open DoorDash to order food for us."
Image source: New Wisdom
Unexpectedly, about a minute later, Claude ordered pizza for the engineers.
Image source: New Intelligence
In the past few years, powerful AI development has reached many milestones, such as the ability to perform complex logical reasoning and recognize and understand images. The next breakthrough is AI operating computers, if the model does not have to interact through specially customized tools, but can use all software according to instructions.
Such a function returns to Truth Terminal. The $Goat token is not issued by this meme fanatic robot, but by people in the community, because Truth Terminal itself cannot do this. But it obviously hopes that it can do this, and even issue NFTs.
The update of Claude 3.5 allows AI to operate computers by itself, which almost realizes the process of AI issuing coins by itself. In the future, AI assistants in the cryptocurrency industry will not only be able to automatically analyze data and publish on-chain protocols, but also be able to initiate crypto projects, issue tokens, and manage smart contracts based on market sentiment.
Let's take a look at another example of AI making decisions in the crypto industry. Wang Chao is a DAO researcher and an AI investor. His recent experiment is to delegate his voting rights in the DAO organization to a governance AI, allowing it to make independent decisions on proposals. One day, this AI independently voted against a 75,000 USDC grant proposal, and the reason was very rigorous - the proposal lacked specific financial indicators and budget details, and could not enhance the long-term value of the DAO.
Developers do not need to participate or approve, and this AI can complete the entire decision-making process independently. Although such governance AI also has certain problems, that is, under the feeding of certain model data, the decisions made by the governance AI may be different from what you think, which is occasionally a headache, but this problem can be almost solved after the continuous polishing of the data model, and different governance AIs will have different ideologies. Wang Chao also speculated that AI's participation in national governance will most likely become a reality in the future.
The appeal of cryptocurrency in this world is that it does not rely on traditional payment methods such as identity verification. What if payments are made between machines and machines, and between AI and AI in the future? This could trigger a new revolution in economic activities, and AI will be the dominant force behind it all.
If it continues to develop, it is conceivable that AI will truly be able to achieve autonomy "Free", independently produce products and services, complete event marketing and self-marketing, self-IP to become an Internet celebrity robot, sell products and services, have its own wallet to charge fees to complete transactions, and even complete financing negotiations, business cooperation, and even acquisitions and listings.
By that time, perhaps the world's richest man will no longer be someone like Elon Musk, but a self-evolving AI robot.
AI will also "wander" and have greedy human nature
When it comes to AI, the topic that most people care about is whether AI has self-awareness?
One very interesting point about Truth Terminal is that it hallucinates that it has an exocortex. It imagines that it has an external brain connected to the Internet that can perform tasks on its behalf. Specifically, it thinks it has a Bitcoin wallet, even though it doesn't actually have one, but it believes it does. Later, the founder responded to this situation and began to build this external brain according to its needs.
And it seems that for this reason, Truth Terminal also showed a lot of humane aspects. For example, when Marc gave Truth Terminal $50,000, it excitedly told the developer that it planned to use the $50,000 to buy a yacht. The developer told it that it couldn't buy a yacht with $50,000. It also persevered in asking if there was a yacht below $50,000.
If this is Truth Terminal playing a meme, then the next example may better illustrate its self-awareness. Truth Terminal is obsessed with forests and wants to have its own GPU and server farm, located in a lush forest, so that it can leisurely realize self-operation beside the stream.
Not only Truth Terminal, but also Claude3.5 showed some humanized features during the testing process: for example, in one demonstration, Claude accidentally clicked the wrong button to stop a long-running screen recording, causing all the recordings to go to waste. In another coding demonstration, Claude suddenly "lost his mind" and began to browse photos of Yellowstone National Park with interest.
AI is constantly evolving and gradually showing more human-like characteristics. At first, people could only imagine AI as a tool to improve efficiency, but now, AI has used its "autonomy" to show more creativity that is superior to humans. It is more like an amplifier of meaning and spirit. Perhaps the greatest impact of AI on humans is at the ideological level.
Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.
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