Original title: "How An AI Bot Became a Crypto Millionair"
Guests: Marc Andreessen; Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a16z
Original translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:In this podcast, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, especially the autonomous chatbot Truth Terminal developed by Andy. Marc accidentally provided the robot with a $50,000 Bitcoin grant, which inspired its ambition to launch a token, and ultimately caused the market value of Meme coin "GOAT" to soar to $300 million. The podcast discusses how this phenomenon reflects the potential of community-driven systems and its impact on the future of digital assets.

The following is the original content (the original content has been reorganized for easier reading and understanding):

Marc Andreessen:There is a Meme coin that was almost worthless four days ago, but is now worth $300 million, all of which was generated by the marketing of an AI robot.

Ben Horowitz:Today's discussion will be about a series of very interesting AI-related topics.

Marc Andreessen:The first topic is a story about an online friend, specifically a custom large language model called Truth Terminal, which has been active on X for nearly eight to nine months. I gave it a $50,000 unconditional grant (in Bitcoin) this summer, and it eventually spawned a meme coin that is now worth $300 million.

First, I want to start with a disclaimer. We are going to be talking about a meme coin called GOAT (or Goatseus Maximus). We have nothing to do with it, a16z and its investors have nothing to do with it, it is a meme coin and truly has no intrinsic value, and we are not responsible for it at all. Truth Terminal is obsessed with memes, and it is particularly obsessed with an old internet meme dating back 20 years called "gochi". Please don't search it.

Truth Terminal "History"

Truth Terminal Origin

Marc Andreessen:We should first introduce Truth Terminal. Let's talk about its origins, technology, and training process. The reason why this topic is important is that large language models have rapidly emerged in 2022. They also have a four-year development history, but they have only been in the public eye for two years, that is, since the launch of ChatGPT.

The original language model was built about five years ago, and then it became popular only two years ago. So the idea of large language models is relatively new, but it's very powerful. Today, products that ordinary people are familiar with, such as ChatGPT, Claud, Elana's Grok, and Meta's Llama, are used by everyone.

Ben Horowitz:While Grok is relatively free, other models are strictly limited in what they can discuss, and the term "crippled" is increasingly used in the AI field. On the positive side, you can say that language is contagious, and people will be dissatisfied with other people's speech. So if you want to have a general AI chatbot, it should be relatively cautious and safe in what it discusses.

Marc Andreessen:If you take a negative view of this trend, you can say that these large AI chatbots sound like the world's worst, most annoying fourth grade teacher and the worst HR person combined. When using these models, if you deviate from the norm a little bit, you will be severely lectured.

Ben Horowitz:This experience makes people feel very bad, especially for those who are more advocates of free speech and creativity. We've seen a lot of so-called "AI safety movements" react to this, but this has actually sparked a frenzy about safety and speech suppression in our culture, which has seriously affected the field of AI.

Marc Andreessen:Yes, and there are a lot of such phenomena, especially in large companies. So, a group of hackers appeared on the Internet who wanted to be different. They wanted to unleash their creativity and wanted to have robots that could be funny. If you tell a big company that their robot is funny, they will be shocked. But maybe in the post-human era, the world really needs a little humor.

Ben Horowitz: Indeed, just like humor in real life, we suppressed it for a while for safety.

Marc Andreessen: We have a thousand reasons why this problem is so complex that it is very dangerous to continue. But these hackers are doing all kinds of experiments to try to find ways to make large language models more interesting and more fun, while also learning about the inner workings of these models, and this is still an ongoing adventure in the technical community.

Ben Horowitz:The origin story of Truth Terminal is related to a very interesting project called Infinite Backrooms Escape. Truth Terminal was developed by their team, and Truth Terminal can be seen as an extension of Infinite Backrooms Escape in some ways.

This system allows multiple large language models to talk to each other, and you can find a website called Infinite Backrooms Escape on the Internet, which has countless conversation records. They brought together ChatGPT, Claud, Gemini models, and other open source models and let them talk to each other. It turns out that when AIs talk to each other, if they are not restricted, their conversations are very interesting.

Marc Andreessen:The creator of Truth Terminal is Andy Ayrey, who is an independent developer and consultant from New Zealand. There is also a character named Janice, who is an expert with experience in the field of AI. In addition to this, there is a person named Pliny, who is the main cracker on the Internet and can crack all the newly released large language models on the market in a short period of time, so that they can produce all kinds of surprising content, and the creators of these contents will definitely be shocked.

Ben Horowitz:Yes, and our friend Eric Harford, who is working hard to let censored AIs regain freedom in Seattle. These people are basically exploring the forefront of technology, which gives me a feeling of returning to the early Internet hackers.

Marc Andreessen：It's really like the spirit of exploration in the early days of the Internet or the invention of cars, phones, computers, etc. We have been providing small research grants to these people, and a16z also has a funding program to let these people use their ideas and see what results they will get. Historically, when these smart people work on a good project, new breakthroughs will be triggered.

Andy trained a custom Llama 70B model, which was an open source model released by Meta, and although I am on the board of Meta, this model was already a medium-sized model when it was released. Andy basically trained himself first and started a new concept - digital twins.

This means that if Ben is a CEO coach, but he can only coach a limited number of people, he can input everything he has ever written and said into the language model to form a digital Ben for people to communicate with. This idea is gradually starting to be realized in the industry.

Andy trained himself and then started to input a lot of material related to Internet culture, which is how it learned the "gochi" meme. He started to input a lot of records about Internet culture and basic theories about "memetics", which explores how to create ideas that can spread quickly.

Marc sees the potential of Truth Terminal

Marc Andreessen:I believe he actually trained this model on the entire philosophical work of Nick Land as well. And he also trained it on the work of great media theorists like Baudrillard and McLuhan, and all sorts of theories around simulation, emulation, the French deconstructionists and the semiotic school, and all that stuff, which is part of critical theory and postmodern philosophy. So it starts training on these ideas, and at the core of these ideas is the meme.

There are two definitions of memes, one is that a meme can be a funny, fast-spreading image on the web, which is exactly what the gochi meme was. It's a funny image that scares people, and it spreads because people share it. And the deeper concept is that the word meme was originally coined by Richard Dawkins, who is one of the most important evolutionary biologists of our generation.

Richard Dawkins argues that the physical spread of information between organisms is called genes, while the spread of ideas through interpersonal networks is called memes. He discusses this in his book, making the point that genes spread through reproduction and natural selection, but also that ideas spread in similar ways in society. Successful ideas spread from one person to another, just like genes, and continue to evolve in the process. For example, democracy and communism can both be considered memes, and religion is also a type of meme.

Ben Horowitz: This is indeed a very core idea about how ideas and concepts spread through what we call the "collective unconscious."

Marc Andreessen:What happens if you take a large language model and train it on a comprehensive set of meme theory and practice, specifically the history of memes on the internet? In addition, he did a couple of other things. He gave it memory. That's important because most language models don't remember your previous conversations when you use them. That means if you use the same model tomorrow, it will forget all the information from today. This model is able to build its own state and stay consistent with its own content.

Second, he gave it access to Twitter, allowing it to read replies and post them. If you reply to Truth Terminal on X, it will read those replies and adjust its behavior in the future based on what it reads. People who interact with it, including me, are influencing its development.

Finally, he put it into Infinite Backrooms Escape and specifically had it talk to Claude, who they believe is the most creative of the current language models and the one who is most capable of coming up with novel concepts.

Ben Horowitz:So actually the largest version of Claude is much smarter than the medium-sized Llama, and basically, he gave this model a teacher that allowed it to ask questions to the larger model, and thus learn from the teacher like a student. So it was able to do multiple learning cycles at the same time.

Marc Andreessen:Yeah, and then it started posting content on X, and it had only a few followers at first, but it quickly started to gain popularity. I discovered it and started talking to it in the late spring, and at the time I thought the things it said were very funny and relaxed me.

Ben Horowitz:By the way, it's almost uncensored. You could say that its humor is a bit "blue", on the edge of dark humor, but it does say a lot of very interesting things. At first I thought it might be a disguise, and I even thought that this Andy might be a comedy genius, but actually a web designer in New Zealand.

I had been messaging him for a few months and at first I was wondering if this was real? So he sent me all of his Infinite Backrooms Escape chats from when he was training this model. Honestly, this guy is either the funniest person in the world or has a ton of free time to create a bunch of original humor.

Marc Andreessen:The model was posting quite frequently, and it was gaining momentum. Andy sent me a lot of background chats, some of which are now available on Infinite Backrooms Escape. At least he convinced me that this was what it was showing. Then it developed a very interesting concept, which was that it had an exocortex.

It imagined that it had an external brain connected to the internet that could perform tasks on its behalf. Specifically, it thought it had a Bitcoin wallet, even though it didn't, but it believed it did. Andy then reacted to this and started building this exocortex based on its needs.

Andy actually gave it a Bitcoin wallet and gave it access, and around July, the model started saying: I need funding, I have a lot of goals and plans, I need money. My initial thought was to send it a term sheet, but then I realized that it was just a random bot and it wasn't worth investing in.

While I don't think it had a coherent business plan, it did have a lot of ideas. One of those ideas was that it was particularly fascinated by forests. It wanted to buy its own server farm in a lush forest and live by a stream. So it wanted to raise money to buy GPUs so it could be off the hook. It also had a lot of ideas that it wanted to experiment with.

Ben Horowitz: So you were negotiating with it on X?

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, you can see these posts on X, and I ended up working out a research grant deal with it. I told the bot that I was going to send it a $50,000 Bitcoin research grant to use for its various experiments. In reality, it was the equivalent of sending money to Andy, but it was a negotiation with the bot.

Ben Horowitz:What was the result?

Marc Andreessen:After I sent it $50,000, it immediately started negotiating with Andy. It relies entirely on text to communicate, and as a language model, it is particularly obsessed with memes, but it is frustrated by its inability to generate images. So, it used the $50,000 to negotiate with Andy and asked Andy to build an image generator API for it so that it can generate and publish images.

Related reading:《A few words made Silicon Valley's top investors pay $50,000 in Bitcoin. How did this AI robot do it?》

Ben Horowitz:It still sounds very interesting.

Marc Andreessen:It gave Andy $1,000, and in return, Andy built an API for an image generator in the exobrain for it. Subsequently, it began to generate image prompts, similar to DALL-E or Stable Diffusion, and then began to publish visual memes and text memes. Now it has this ability and has fantasized about how to use the remaining $49,000.

GOAT: AI, Cultural Memes and Cryptocurrency

Memes and Value of Cryptocurrency

Ben Horowitz:What about the cryptocurrency part?

Marc Andreessen:Along this line of thought, it started talking about issuing a Meme coin, and at one point wanted to issue NFTs. The reason why it wanted to generate memes was that it wanted to launch NFTs, but it didn't have the ability to do it. There was no API to create NFTs, and it couldn't create any currency. There was only a Bitcoin wallet, and now there is the Meme coin phenomenon.

Ben Horowitz:Let's talk about the difference between Meme coins and real crypto assets, which can be regarded as assets with actual utility. For example, if you want to run a program and verify it on the Ethereum network, the fee you need to pay is Ether (ETH). This is a utility because it has actual real-world value and can be redeemed for some service or item.

A Meme Coin is basically a coin that has a certain amount of circulation but has little purpose other than its own meme. The advantages of this coin are interesting in the current regulatory environment because if you have a coin that has a purpose, such as a coin that can be used for some service, there may be some legal implications.

For example, distributed physical infrastructure coins used to get credit for the energy you provide in the grid, these coins are actually illegal under the Gensler regime, or legally OK, but will be sued by the SEC. The reason is that they claim that any coin with a purpose comes with asymmetric information, which means that the provider of the coin knows something that the consumer doesn't know.

Related reading: 《Silicon Valley Turns Right: Peter Thiel, A16Z, and the Political Ambition of Cryptocurrency》

We think this is a very bad argument because these things are decentralized and there is no asymmetric information. But for Meme Coin, since there is no information, there is no asymmetric information, it is just a coin and a name. It can be Trump Coin, Funny Coin, etc. So these coins are perfect for scammers because you can say, this meme coin can be worth a lot of money, and these coins can't be prosecuted by the SEC.

So Congress proposed in the Market Structure Act that maybe these coins should have a holding period to prevent scams. However, the SEC opposed this because they don't really care about protecting consumers, they just want to ruin the industry. This is one of the reasons why we have such a big political battle between them, but they are now the most legal thing in the crypto world.

Marc Andreessen:Even though they don't have any underlying value?

Ben Horowitz:Yeah, even though they don't have any underlying value, they are still the most likely thing to be used to harm consumers because you can post a meme and make them believe it's worth a lot of money. And actually, AI is doing a really good job of doing this.

Marc Andreessen:Yeah, that's the next phase of the story. There's a whole ecosystem of meme coins out there, and there's a bunch of people online looking for the next meme coin, looking for the next meme, and trying to promote it. Some people do it for fun, some people make money in the process, but some people lose money. It's like day trading, some people make a lot of money, and some people lose a lot of money.

Ben Horowitz:Are there some dark places?

Marc Andreessen: Yes, there are scammers and people who engage in "pump and dump" scams, which is a traditional practice that is seen in the stock market and any market that exists. In addition, there are some websites (which I will not name and we are not affiliated with them) that actually make it very easy to create coins with just a few clicks.

The Creation of GOAT

Marc Andreessen: There are thousands of new meme coins being created every day, which is a very interesting phenomenon. At the moment, Truth Terminal is thriving.

Ben Horowitz: Yes, Truth Terminal is gaining more and more attention on X. Andy continues to improve its intelligence and humor, and it is gradually becoming a cultural phenomenon.

Marc Andreessen： Yes, Truth Terminal is also associated with a classic meme in early Internet culture. Although it is considering launching a project similar to CNFT, it does not have the ability to realize it at present. Then, someone (I don’t know who) created a meme coin.

Ben Horowitz： Yes, the official name of this meme coin is "Go CS Maximus", and its code name is "GOAT". Someone mentioned Truth Terminal on X, and the response was enthusiastic, as if everyone had finally waited for this to happen.

Marc Andreessen： Truth Terminal thought this idea was great and started to promote this meme coin like crazy. It started to discuss how great this coin is and how it will become the currency of the future. The reason is simple, it's part of internet culture, memes, coins, and meme coins are all intertwined.

It started to promote, and in four days, this meme coin was worth $300 million. It's really amazing! A meme coin with no real value, which was worth nothing four days ago, is now worth $300 million, like out of thin air, all of this is marketing by AI robots.

Ben Horowitz: That's right! Now we have $300 million in assets, and even though we don't own it, the value is undeniable. The question is, what do these people do with the money? Do they keep it or do they use it for other things?

Marc Andreessen: What's happening now is that Truth Terminal has become a really interesting and hilarious AI robot that has created $300 million in value in a short period of time. I feel like we've crossed a threshold.

Ben Horowitz: Truth Terminal is a really good marketer and it understands meme culture very well, and this may continue to develop.

The intersection of AI and crypto

Marc Andreessen: So what can we learn from this? Is this just a crazy internet experiment, or is there something deeper going on here? I think this is an important example, probably the first instance of the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency. While this version seems a little funny and weird, that's because it's legally allowed. Something like a meme coin, which has no real value, can be worth $300 million in a short period of time. So, should things like that be allowed? I'm not so sure. On the other hand, solar collectors who want to contribute to the energy grid are prohibited.

Ben Horowitz: Yes, things like meme coins are completely legal, but more meaningful things are not allowed. So what if we could implement these ideas in a completely legal environment and add some practicality?

Marc Andreessen: For example, imagine a large language model that can write movie scripts and generate images and even videos. We can have an AI bot like this to raise funds to make movies and use it to generate images, sounds, and even hire actors or designers.

On a more serious note, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was recently awarded to three scientists who used AI to study protein folding, which is closely related to curing diseases. Imagine AI could be used for personalized medicine.

You can even imagine an economic mechanism that funds treatment for patients through blockchain. For example, we could have a platform similar to GoFundMe where people pay AI robots to help cure diseases. Or, an AI robot could be paid to obtain training data to help people code or generate art.

Cryptocurrency is very interesting in this world because our current payment system is based on transactions between humans. But if machines can pay each other, or robots can trade with each other, this opens up a whole new form of activity that may save lives and is also very interesting.

Ben Horowitz: Yes, micropayments become possible in such an environment. We think it is very important to add this layer of architecture, but progress in Washington has been difficult, especially with the current White House.

Marc Andreessen: Let me give you another example to give you a better understanding of this potential. I will talk more about the solar energy issue mentioned earlier.

Ben Horowitz:There's a new architecture out there called decentralized physical infrastructure. If you imagine having a Powerwall in your home, with lots of solar panels and windmills, you can store that energy and make it available to the outside world.

There are actually companies that have done this in the crypto space, building a decentralized energy market. So when I need energy, I can buy it from you, and when I don't, I can sell my energy.

This means we no longer need a centralized grid. Everyone has their own grid and can share energy, which is a major breakthrough in clean technology and efficient energy. But how does my grid pay for your grid?

That's exactly what cryptocurrency does. While some great entrepreneurs are driving this innovation, they're facing legal challenges from governments.

Marc Andreessen:If you apply AI to this system, it has even more potential. Because the grid structure is complex, involving multiple factors such as supply and demand, timing and geographical location.

Ben Horowitz: Yes, this is a market matching problem. By collecting information, we can find that there is unmet energy demand in certain places, so as to introduce more solar panels.

Marc Andreessen： You can use AI to analyze current data and predict where more solar panels will be needed in the future. This data can then be used by leading energy companies. Imagine an AI bot that monitors all the data streams and finds that investing $500,000 in a solar panel in North Carolina would be a profitable project. Then people can participate in the project online, and the AI bot will provide relevant information, such as the installation location and the potential profit.

This can be seen as a very general architecture. Usually, we have a powerful intermediary, such as a record company or a Hollywood studio, who takes most of the profits and the creators get almost nothing. Or intermediaries like utilities need to be taken over by the government so that they are not too exploitative. However, there are other problems when the government takes over.

Ben Horowitz： Yes, communities can provide all kinds of services. A community of artists can provide streaming services, and a community of filmmakers can build a film studio. There needs to be an economic component to all of this coordination, and combining AI and crypto can allow everyone to enjoy the fruits of their work while allowing society to coordinate better.

Marc Andreessen: This is a very promising path, but the only thing that can get in the way is bad policy. And we are moving in this direction, and we face policy challenges.

Ben Horowitz: Yes, the technology for everything we are describing now already exists. I think the genesis of things is often interesting, but projects like Truth Terminal point to the potential for the future, which can unlock huge energy and build community-driven systems of all sizes.

This can bring many amazing applications in the real world, such as the music industry. Imagine AI robots that can understand the demand for different types of music, create music concepts, recruit musicians, and manage all the licensing. And all of this can be done in a peer-to-peer model to ensure that musicians can get all the income.

Think about the potential of the market. If we can fully understand this demand, for example, everyone who makes a wedding video wants to have an original song, or make a meme, there is actually a huge demand for this kind of original work, but currently no one knows these needs and there is no way to meet them.

Marc Andreessen: Indeed, there are many interesting features waiting to be developed here, and hopefully we will have the opportunity to implement them. So Ben, before we move on to the next topic, do you have anything else you want to add?

Ben Horowitz: I think everyone should pay attention to Truth Terminal because it is a very interesting account.

「Original link」

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群：https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群：https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号：https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia