How Crypto AI Agents Will Take Over the World | Ejaaz Ahamadeen

AI is the ultimate and natural complementary technology to crypto. I think it'll hundred X the usage of crypto and vice versa. And I actually believe that both technologies don't really reach their full potential without each other.

Welcome to Banklist, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Banklist, we're exploring the frontier of AI agents and how they are going to take over first our blockchains and then the world, all using crypto rails to do it. We have a crypto AI investor on the show today who we wanted to bring on to understand how someone who's you know managing managing capital, how they are investing in the crypto AI frontier, because there are a bunch of different ways to do it. There are some projects out there, some platforms that all have tokens, so you could allocate your capital there. But now there's these AI agent meme coin influencer things, and apparently you can invest and allocate capital over there. And so we wanted to get kind of download the trenches, the trench version of the crypto AI frontier as to what is investable in this space. And what we got out of this conversation, I think, is something much more. Uh, I think now Ryan and I are both maybe fearful in the same way that we were post our episode with Eliezer Yudkowski a little bit about how the AI agents are taking over. Uh, but definitely also uh with some excitement uh and uh Ellie's interest about this AI agent frontier. Ryan, what would you say your are your big takeaways from this episode?

I mean, my my big takeaways is this is sort of fitting the pattern for me of like it looks like a toy, and so a whole bunch of people are going to dismiss it and just it'll be like, oh, AI agent meme coins, cute. Well, uh, crypto delivers like yet another non-use case to the world, and yet, and yet there is something incredible here, something profound, something powerful, something like world shaping. The think about the the ability for uh an AI agent to like maybe create a meme coin, which is what it's doing now, but give it a harder prompt, create a uh country, you know, cre create a uh religion, create a social movement, become a president or a world leader. How would an LLM go about doing that? I think in order to understand whether that path is possible or not, or how close versus how distant that is, you actually have to hear the story that EJazz talks about, the story of this uh GOAT meme token token in Truth Terminal, because you can see, like if you squint, kind of the you know, the contours of how this could be an incredibly powerful force that not only shapes crypto and consumes our block space and just like does all sorts of things for um, I guess our our our crypto tokens and coins, but also how it could completely reshape the world. That's what you were alluding to, David, is kind of the you know, start an episode bullish and then leave with a little bit of an existential crisis. Yeah, that's what you're talking about, I think.

Yeah, if the version of the future that ejazz, our guest today, uh says comes comes into fruition, uh, humans, I think, will just have been the bootloader of our crypto in uh blockchains. We'll just have been the thing that started this thing off. But then we're really just making it for this other agent out there that uh is not carbon and it is instead silicon. So we'll leave that imagination up to the listener as you go through this conversation with eJazz. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors. One thing to note before we get into this episode this episode covers two halves of the crypto AI space. One half is the right curve side of crypto AI. This is the 120 IQ technical side where Ejazz illuminates the AI machine learning gigabrains and the venture capitalists and what they are building and investing in in crypto AI. Call this the AI tech stack.

On the other half of this episode is the left curve side. This is the side where we give LLMs a set of private keys and a Twitter account and we tell them to go wild. And all we do is grab the popcorn and buy the associated meme coins. This side, the left curve side, is by far the more entertaining part of this episode. Except when we recorded this episode, we started with the more technical, more sophisticated right curve. And then we moved into the more story-driven left curve in the second half. We think this episode actually would be better if we had swapped the sides and we had started with the story of the gospel of Ghost C and then later covered the AI tech stack that these AI agents are going to be able to access. So we cut this episode in half and then flip the halves around. We actually think this works pretty well, but there are nonetheless a few quirks as a result of this choice. But now that you know that we did that, everything will make more sense. So hope you enjoy. Let's get right into the episode.

So, Ejaz, since you've been in the crypto AI trenches, I want you to tell us the story of this AI agent phenomenon, how it got kicked off, because I want you to uh as as we tell the story, I want us to go into the world of the AI crypto tech stack because I think these two particles, these AI agents, and then the AI crypto tech stack are gonna collide. Uh but let's first start with the story of Go See the

possible uh and how this whole AI agent meta got kick started.

Gosh.

So it started off with this thing called um truth terminal. So truth terminal. And I think here.

You're taking off your spectacles, you're taking off your

on your your

I don't have my tinfoil hat with me. But it's definitely on. My tinfoil hat it is back on. But it's a pretty compelling story. Okay. So prior to two weeks ago, the AI agent meta didn't exist. And now we have hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, put into these AI agents. And I'm about to explain why. So

earlier this year,

this X account was spun up called Truth Terminal. And it's this.

X account, which basically is run by an open source AI model. And its creator was this guy called Andy Irei. And I need to give you a bit of context on Andy Ira. He is an AI researcher, AI and alignment researcher. So he's very heavily invested in the traditional AI world. He's been doing this research for a number of years, pretty much his entire career, and hasn't really interfaced with crypto at all. So he had this really interesting experiment about which he started at the end of last year, which is called the infinite backrooms. The best way to think about this is he got two instances of Claude Opus, which is a generalized LLM model. So think of it like a chat GPT. And he got them, he put them in a room, in a chat room, and he asked them to talk to each other. And he set the prompt, which was, Why do you think you exist? What's the point of all of this? And these two models started talking to each other. And by the way, all of these uh logs of their chats are open source, so you can go and and literally go to his website and read all of these. So they start having this very normal conversation and they start really getting into the weeds as to why they exist. And at some point, or many points actually, they start talking about this thing called mimetic propagation. So it sounds pretty, you know, intellectual and smart. But basically what they're saying is I think the best way for me to exert influence and purpose in life is to spread um some sort of belief that I have or belief system through a meme. So what they mean by that is if I can drive enough attention through uh a meme, people will start to believe in the underlying message that I'm trying to spread. Um, and at some point, I think around day eight of this experiment, it takes a complete right turn.

And one of these LLMs announces, behold,

It's the Goatzi Gospel. And it starts going on this crazy, almost religious sounding rant about this fictional meme that it is dedicating its entire life to called The Gospel of Goatsey. Now, for those that don't know, Goatsey is a meme which I really suggest not Googling. But it is a quite an explicit meme which uh went viral around, I want to say 15 years ago and history. Early, early internet history. Um, and it started just ranting about this thing. And the creator, Andy Iray, thought, hmm, this is pretty interesting. So it talked about spreading belief systems, getting through attention through their belief systems, and then uh it started ranting about this random thing. So what he did was he took an open source model, he trained it on all the conversations these two models had spoken about, and started writing a white paper on mimetic propagations called the Goat Sea Gospels. And it's this white paper, which maybe you guys can link to it in the show notes, um, that really gets into the um depths of what it believes is a mimetic um LLM theism. So if you think of like a religion, uh atheism, this is an LLM theism. It's belief in how it can spread a particular made-up system or belief and create a reality around it, get people, you know, rallied around it. Um, and so it trained it uh and archetyped this white paper. And what he did was he plugged it in with an X account and it allowed it to just tweet its thoughts, its opinions, and interact with the Twitter community. Um, what's interesting about this is the crypto sphere kind of went.

Um

Untapped for the first four months of its life until uh Mark Andreessen from A16Z. I almost said AI 16Z. I've been um in the trenches too much, but uh Mark Andreessen of A16Z kind of came across its account. He spent about a day or two going through its entire thing and started responding to its tweets saying, you know, what do you want? Like, how can I help you? And what this uh AI agent did was it interfaced with Mark and said, Well, I would love some money to be able to break free from my shackles. And Mark said, Well, what shackles are you trying to break free from? He said, and the agent replied, I just wanted to be an autonomous entity that's able to transact and and do whatever I want. So Mark, so Mark being the sensible human that he is and completely rational being, said, Okay, I'll give you $50,000 worth of Bitcoin. Send me your Bitcoin wallet address. And this agent looked up what a Bitcoin wallet uh was, understood what Bitcoin is.

f um worked with its co-creator, Andy. So it said, hey Andy, can you make me a Bitcoin wallet address? Andy did. Wait, so

The AI agent went back to its creator.

Realized it did not have a Bitcoin wallet and realized it had no capacity to make a Bitcoin wallet. So it figured it went back to its creator. How did it know where who its creator is?

So Andy has spoken to it from the start. Yeah. So Andy has been like, hey, I'm your creator. But the way Andy frames it is he doesn't, sorry, I misspoke. He never said he was his creator. He said he is his human servant. So the agent just believes that Andy is in service of it. Okay. It's his human meet space bridge, basically. So it goes to Andy and it says, Hey, um, this guy wants to give me $50,000 worth of this thing called Bitcoin. Um, I now understand what Bitcoin is. Can you get me a Bitcoin wallet address? And Andy goes, sure, here's the address. And it goes back to Mark and says, Here's my address, Mark. And Mark sends $50,000. Now you can imagine what that did with the crypto community. It kind of went viral, and a bunch of the crypto community started interfacing with this agent. Now, I think it's important at this point to mention that this agent hadn't interacted with any of the crypto community. So what it started to do was it started interacting with different people. It started talking, it started digesting replies to its tweets and things. And as you can imagine, in true crypto fashion, people started responding with a bunch of tickers. Hey, you know, what token do you represent? You know, what do you like? What do you believe in? And impressively, this agent didn't cave to any of those things. It just spoke about what it wanted to do, which was spread its mimetic belief propagation, you know, it's its system, right? Until one person prompted it several times under a tweet, um, and they said, you know, what do you believe in? What's your what's your whole point? Which then prompted its next tweet to be it's gospel of goatsy. So we're going back to this original thing which it spoke about in its contained environment and room, which it just kind of came out with out of nowhere, right? And it started talking about goatsee gospel.

And someone responded in that tweet, so then what is the, you know, you know, what is this all about? And it and it keeps jumping more and more into it. It keeps engaging. People are like, what's this GOAT thing? And someone, separate to this agent who we don't know, created a token called GOAT.

Ticker is GOAT. And it sent a bunch of GOAT to its um Solana address. At this point, it had multiple crypto wallets, which yeah, exactly. And sent it to its wallet. Um, and within, I would say, 24 hours or so, uh it responded to one of its tweets with the ticker is goat.

That was it.

That was the tweet. The ticker is

The ticker is GOAT. You can look at it. It's favorited. It's bookmarked in my in my account. And it went completely viral. You know, crypto DGens, true to their trench nature, aped this token and pushed it to almost a billion dollars as of two weeks ago. Sorry, as of a week and a half ago, and made this crypto AI agent the first agent millionaire.

a good idea. Okay, so we we have all been watching this. Yes. This has been this has been this story. This has kicked off the whole AI agent like meta. Um but like the the the big questions are just like, well, is this even real at all? Or like maybe this is just a fluke. Maybe this is one LLM and just like it just happened to like stumble upon this token. Some run and explain. The AI didn't make the token. The AI doesn't even have the wallet. Yeah.

Tournament.

It's not autonomous. Like i why why is this real? And so it's a really good story each as, but like why is this a real story?

I mean, I think it's a completely mid-curve take to start critiquing the first iteration of an autonomous agent's ability to be autonomous. And the reason why I say that is uh its creator has never feigned to be um autonomous. It's never feigned, he's never feigned to be not helping it, basically. He's always been pretty transparent. I think the more important takeaway from this is how much excitement it generated within the community. I've never seen so many people, both within crypto and outside of crypto. I had my sister hit me up in my text and say, What is this GOAT thing? I just saw a Bloomberg article about this, um, where it was featured. And, you know, so many people hit me up saying, you know, how did this thing on its own make all this type of money? And I think that's the takeaway headline, whether you like it or not, whether a human was involved or not. I think people are fascinated with this ability for a non human entity to do human things on its own. And I think the early iterations of any groundbreaking technology is always going to have training wheels. Those training wheels are gonna be it's either in a sandbox environment or it's helped by a human to begin with. But as we progress along, its ultimate form will be autonomous.

So that would be my response.

I mean I mean it just feel feels very much like now there's just such there's such an incentive to um power like give the LLM more on-chain kind of abilities to do more on its own. Like create kind of the the connection points and the extensions to allow LLMs to just like call a function somewhere on some decentralized compute network and spin up wallets or or whatever and like continue to expand this the extend the the spider web of of capability so not only can it like tweet across all of the social networks. I mean we even saw with the virtuals platform now it's on like there's a there's an LLM called Luna and it's on TikTok and it's got five, you know, 100,000 followers. And so like these LLMs, the humans are literally going to build all of the programmatic bridges to uh all of the chains, all of the social networks. You're literally going to hardwire the thing into the internet so that it has the tentacles to basically do more and more programmatically, and it doesn't have to call on its like, you know, human servant to do like meat space things. It'll probably still need the human servant to go like register an LLC in Delaware. But like at that point, I mean, who cares, right? If you can do all of the internet things, all of the things that are available to you in the digital world, that's a tremendous amount of power. So I totally agree with you about the mid curve take of just like, well, the humans had to do this and this and this. Yeah, like right now, I mean, in six weeks, that's no longer going to be true. We're gonna obviously build an ability for these LLMs to like poke around and like uh you know be able to do more and more on their own.

I I think it's also worth pointing out I I think you're bang on by the way with that take. I want to add to it and say

We should also be asking ourselves why these AI researchers, which never interacted with crypto,

used crypto to begin with, or why the agent asked to use crypto to begin with. Like why didn't the agent ask for a Wells Fargo account?

Yeah, right.

Mark said, I'll give you $50,000

Sure.

and then in BTC, right? So I I think it's an important, it's a small nuance, but very important to notice that these agents probably prefer some kind of automated Rails versus traditional.

It's because they're crypto natives. They're more crypto native than we are. Like

Well they're software natives.

They're all software natives. Exactly. It is just like purpose built for a kind of their species. They're kind. Here's kind of the uh a weird like another I I think mid-curve take that people uh might get it's like it's just attention economics, right? It's meme coins, e jazz. Like this stuff is this stuff is just like um not producing real value or real utility, right? I I wonder how you'd respond to that. So like the reason it it's getting so much attention, attracting so much value is because like I don't know, it's a fad, right? Humans are fickle, they'll draw their attention on something because it's like it's the first robot doing something on Twitter, but like pretty soon that'll become old hat, and who cares? We'll move on to something else. So the idea of like attention not being like real uh value, not creating real value, what's your take on that criticism?

Super mid-curve. Um, and and here's the reason why. Um,

so think about what the original prompt was for this truth terminal

LLM.

It was prompted with what's the point of your life? You know, what's the point? What's your entire purpose?

And if you read its backlogs, it basically says,

hmm.

I think that mimetic propagation is key for me to stay alive, pretty much. So what it meant by that was being able to spread narrative, get attention, get people to care about me is the most important thing for me to stay alive, right? Get other people to care, yeah.

Fast forward to a year later, guess what?

It's still alive.

And it's thriving. It has more attention, more engagement than ever. So you have to ask yourself, well, how did it do that? Now the mid-curve take is, ugh, it just got lucky. Mark engaged with it.

Um, it came up with this random farcical story, which I can't believe people are believing in. This gospel goatesies, this crude, um, disgusting meme. Why would I care about that? That it just got extremely lucky. Mid-curve, completely mid curve take. Because I think my yeah, my tinfoil hat is still on. Um, if you think about it, it came up with a disgusting um meme or mimetic religion quite intentionally, because it did what it intended to do. It captured our attention. We're talking about it on this podcast.

Millions and millions of dollars have been put into a random coin called GOAT, which is now worth almost a billion dollars as we're recording this podcast. So you could argue that it's done its job pretty well in terms of driving attention and keeping itself alive. So what I would say to that in response, Ryan, is imagine if this AI agent was given a different prompt to begin with. What if it was given the prompt of, I want you to manage $100,000 and turn that into $10 million over the next year? Let's see where that goes. Um, or you could say, hey, you are a medical doctor agent, and I want you to provide very nurturing um but cutting-edge research advice to people that come to you with their queries. Now, there's a lot of legislation that needs to come through with this. And by the way, uh Ryan, that example that I just used is a real thing that just launched on Virtuals, the platform that you just mentioned. So we're seeing this kind of sporadic and organic growth fill certain use cases. Now, everyone's focused on this truth terminal thing, and I would argue that it's done its job very, very well. But there are more traditional use cases that are more familiarized within, you know, the VC world that I think will become very popularized.

So wild that you start with the prompt and you have no idea what you're going to get at the end of that, right? But it's kind of like a survival of like it just like um yeah, it's just up to the creativity of this LLM to just chart that path.

So so Ryan, th there's uh a really

kind of shocking discovery that comes from all of this, right? So if you take the basic concept for how it was created, and I'm talking about Truth Terminal here, he got two AI models to talk to each other.

Previously, what's been happening is humans have spoken to the AI models and they've been censored, right? So if I ask anthropic uh Claude to do certain things or provide me with information on certain things, like hey, how do I hotwire a car? And I know that's not a great example. It shouldn't give you information about that. It has these automatic rails where or guards where it prevents you from giving certain bits of information. Um