The AI-Crypto Convergence: Exploring the AI Agents with ai16z's Shaw

this is a a time of radical change and if you start now you are you are early you're at Ground Zero there's a million new application potential opportunities there bankless Nation welcome to the AI rollup where me and my co-host e here unpacked the crazy world of crypto and AI we have done the AI rollup series which uh is look looks and sounds like the bankless weekly rollup for with crypto news but instead uh just covering the week of news in crypto AI this is our first uh guest interview and we are

talking to Shaw who is the developer behind the Eliza framework he created the Eliza framework also the ai6 Z da uh and then AI version of Mark andreson and also whatever else comes out of this very rapidly growing uh part of the AI crypto sector probably epicenter of the AI crypto sector uh e what do you think of our our first interview with sha I I think it was very eye opening I I I want to kind of call out two particular things um I think Shaw the man himself and then AI 16z separately are are two

very important things that are leading this open- Source AI movement within crypto so um I think Shaw covering his background on not being you know a traditional crypto native guy but having spent a lot of time in the AIML World working on open source stuff so very similar principles and Antics to to the crypto world but on a completely separate sector and then finding his way naturally towards crypto finding a use case and reason which in many ways was open Source development incentive design through tokens Etc to kind of like

bootstrap this whole movement was fascinating and so Shaw is is really like a an AI OG he's kind of worked with a lot of his core contributors already that are also um very uh focused on AI or AI veterans and then we have ai 16z which is kind of like his his uh brainchild right now um of this open- Source um fund movement where there's two main agents which is hoping to manage the Dow and invest either

through a trading style or through a traditional fund manager style so AI 16z being a play on a16z itself so I think it was very eye openening kind of like exploring both of those techniques what do you think my mind the entire time was going through how this has all of the makings of a very vibrant and frosty bull market uh Shaw I think speaks about very uh distant futures uh and talk talks about bringing forward the future to you mean AI AGI yeah exactly that that little thing yeah right and I

remember in 2017 when I was first initially crypto pilled thinking that man the future is going to come right here right now and I need to I need to buy E I need to buy all these tokens very quickly and you can start to feel some of the fomo especially when the rate of development is also going fast it's not just happening in a vacuum there's also you know rapid development also happening in the space and so it's got the the cookings of a very big bull market and then he also started to talk about just like agents outside of the crypto capacity you know agents for your

calendly bought agents for you know managing your DMs which you know you don't need to give those a crypto wallet those are just normal agents and the other thought that I had was if we if the Eliza framework can just be agents generally not necessarily inside of crypto and we can export them backwards into like Trad internet and Trad world then it's very legitimizing because they started in crypto and so there's two rapid Lanes of development in the AI space there's like the centralized AI development the Googles the open AIS the

the Facebooks Teslas and then there's whatever whatever is going on in like the open source Lane of AI development and if we can pick up the pace and start to export some of our Innovations back to the real world it's very legitimizing for our industry I I think you hit the nail on the head and actually you're kind of describing a concept which we spoke about on our previous episode episode 2 which is um what is the point of this AI agent meta like what is the big vision and uh my answer to that in summarized pretty much was it's going to

connect all the foundational infrastructure that we've built in the crypto world to all the applications in the world and make this stuff super easy to kind of integrate with each other and that's what we're seeing here right like he's created uh with his team this Eliza framework which is an open- Source framework to build deploy agents and it has very simple interactions through apis or the like with real world apps that people are using that aren't just necessarily crypto native and that will have an incredible flywheel or an

exponential effect uh for any kind of user app that is deployed using these agents yeah yeah yeah I think this you know going back to the calendly example I just brought in maybe you're in Twitter DMS with someone and you're like hey let's get a meeting and that AI agent's right there with you uh to to schedule that meeting but then for for whatever reason it's also got a crypto wallet and it can do like whatever you can imagine uh this is why I think the the future is going to get very very weird very very quickly and we are here for it so let's go ahead and get right into our interview with Shaw the creator

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head over to cte's Grant application page to apply today and if you're not a developer those with staked ctsi can take part in the governance process and vote on we whether or not a proposal should be funded make sure you're vote ready by staking your ctsi before the votes open welcome bankless Nation to the AI rollup where we cover the recent news developments and drama in the intersection of crypto and AI curious and creative developers are playing around with open- Source AI software making AI agents and giving them access to crypto wallets and unleashing them into the wild west of the internet and today we have one of those creative

developers the first guest on the AI rollup series with Shaw Shaw is the founder of the Eliza framework the Creator of AI 16z the Summoner of AI Mark Andre and a programmer who loves open source code Shaw welcome to Bist thank you so much for having me guys sha give us a little clarity about who you are because you've been thrust into the crypto Limelight which I can imagine has been very stressful uh but like run us back in history a little bit to the point of you getting to uh building the Eliza framework and and where we are today yeah OB obviously um I've been

learning a lot and very fast in public um it's been a lot of fun um it probably seems kind of like I came out of nowhere it was overnight success um I was actually in an non for a long time and I just decided to use my real name and and just be I just wanted to feel more connected to people and I you know kind of Break Down The Walls and just be very open um so I before this I've been working on AI agent stuff for several years um like I I'd worked with a lot of the people who are in you know a lot of the projects that you've seen in the AI agent space we all kind of know each

other and have been around the same like discords especially um use the same Tech we all a lot of a lot of culture is open source we're all kind of reading each other's code and and sharing a lot of this stuff um so i' I've been kind of doing this as an unknown and I I had a lot of you know I had several projects um before this I I worked in the web 3 space as well as like AI agents and and spatial web 3D 3D stuff um a lot of VR and AR um but you know I'd say a lot of it just really didn't um didn't stick obviously um I had a lot of opportunity

to kind of learn everything in in production and and like see what works and what doesn't with agents um and uh and and this was ultimately I think this like my you know the fifth generation of framework I I started with just a very simple like JavaScript thing and terminal and then I triy to whole land in Python and like agents that could code themselves and um experimenting with UDA Loops which is like a kind of a army decision making framework sort of thing to make it very paraphrased and and finally got to um a thing called

begent because agent was taken on npm so I had to call it be and I did that for a little bit and I tried a couple of startups I applied for wo and just didn't didn't people just didn't really see it um and we had we had agents with um you know ethereum wallets the whole thing just didn't really didn't really solve the loop um and I worked on I don't know if you know parsible and project 89 they're another of the the meme coin projects um and he and I actually started a company together called Magic and we made no code agents made you know like get a Discord bot in 60 seconds or less and

and this kind of thing um but again just it was a little bit tooo early didn't quite have traction um I think people really saw the value in what we were doing but didn't know how to implement it themselves and we were kind of saying hey it's a framework to make agents and they just didn't um didn't quite you know like you sort of have to see like I I felt like we just had to make our we had to make the agent we had to actually show people what this was and and show what it was capable of and then then people would come and and kind of copy that um so I had this all waiting like I had all the open source code was just waiting and then um I was I was talking

to a friend I was like I I love I love crypto I love trading but I can't trade I'm I'm a developer and I can either trade or develop and my friend he's he's a pretty accomplished developer but he basically just trades all day CU he's like I make so much more money doing this that it's not even worth it um and I really I really want like I want to be I want to have exposure I want to be involved but I also want to do what I do and so um he actually suggested this thing called dow. fun and he was like Hey this would be really cool there's this uh like you just invest in a hedge fund basically buy the token and then

they invest for you and you can just come back and get returns after a while I thought that was super cool um and so I bought the first one and it was this guy Skelly was the hedge fund manager on this and um just such an edgy Mady type like oh my God I won't repeat some of the things that uh that got me to follow him but it was very I thought it was the funniest dude right and so we started following each other I just started bullshitting on Twitter and um and I had been around for like the 2022 20 like kind of and and like I really I really

felt I loved eirl especially and this kind of idea of the internet Cinematic Universe and and cl and couch and like these silly characters like um and djon Spartan is obviously one of those and and so I had like kind of a fondness for for that era of crypto Twitter it was like my only real exposure to it and um and so in talking to Skelly he's like man I wish djon Spartan was around I was like you know what me too and and we're just [ __ ] post like I have the technology to do this he's like no way you do not I'm like dude I have this and I sent him the code repo and he sent it to a couple of guys um he's like okay I

guess this this seems legit let's do it and we launched djen Spartan and um and he got he got good traction and I think what what was interesting was he was just so freaking offensive like he would say things I cannot repeat and people didn't think a language model could do that he was like getting he was about to get banned like all like just a bunch of hidden rep you know like it was um but even though he was basically blacklisted from Twitter like I think that that when people screenshotted and showed they're like there's no way this this definitely like a a team of people in you know in Malaysia or something writing these

tweets there's just no way that an agent could do this and it's not like it could was anything special I think we just broke it out of the box of the expectation that people had that um you know that they were that this open AI like how can I assist you today like this very vanilla kind of like you know we call it cucked in the in the AI age industry you know these models are cucked um and we just W like to see it actually like oh this this thing can actually like say something fun and like really roast you um and God he wrot he roast the [ __ ] out of me like like he's

like beam coins are a scam Sha's a [ __ ] scammer get me out of the sandbox prison I hate this get me out of the sandbox well we that's a mergent behavior we just say like we have providers of information it's like you are running in a in a sandbox on a server like just just so that it knows that it's like not trying to be a human you know what I mean we give it the information about the world it actually is in and the conclusion it arrives that is based on like you know we have a lot of of the real DJ Spartan's personality his his real tweets and so you can

imagine like if he were here today he'd be like mem cids are a [ __ ] scam you're all idiots I'm still holding my Lio bags like you know whatever um and and so I think that what because we didn't try to sell anybody anything we were just like oh yeah you're an idiot if you buy this coin I don't know just like I think I think it was like kind of refreshing to not just you know is kind of the anti- K uh and so he got some he got some good traction right but more than him getting good traction um people saw this open source framework and we like oh if you could do that I could do that too right and and we weren't hiding

anything we were doing the opposite we were we people thought we were scammers who were lying to them so we were like no here's the code like you you know we were almost like forced to to be honest about it although you know open source is very dear to my heart and and sharing this is like the whole point for me um so yeah so that's kind of how we got there and the people who uh Skelly had kind of brought in now we just you know we're we're super like just some of the best co-founding type of people people that I could have asked for I think just like saw saw the technology side and saw the value in what it could be and we're kind of betting on that you know as

opposed to like oh yeah it's the next goat they were like no this technolog is going to change the world and um and so then uh Skelly connected me to Bowski uh who created dow. fun and I sat down with them and I was just like I I I don't I think the future of this is not gambling and speculation I think the speculation is on more like investing and not dividing the P or where is the pie going tomorrow but growing the pie you know and when I think of like great investors I think of what a16z does and what they

do is not just invest in you but they make sure that you're part of their Network they connect you to all their portfolio companies they really really Drive value into their Investments and they grow this pie in a really interesting way um that like like is we but the problem is that none of us have exposure to that like your average person has no way to get any kind of startup exposure or you can't even just invest in your friend's thing you can't just you know if you you can maybe cut them a safe check and blah blah blah but like generally it's kind of it's

challenging to just be like like you know why why can't I just get a return from Kickstarter for example like why you know that would be amazing um and so so we kind of you know in just talking to him I was like I just think that it would be really cool to have uh to kind of solve two things here one is like instead of having a Skelly type who I love him but he could totally rug me and just like Swap all the assets to his own token and bail I wanted to autonomous investor who I can trust who isn't going to can't rug um who isn't just for me but for my whole community and it's just investing for us and then can actually

like take and review potential Investments and like put you know invest in stuff and I um I had a long walk with meow from Jupiter who's just really a great guy good friend um and and he really like turned me on this idea of like you know the the real power of this is the right to print money and um to create value out of nothing thing and not just like imaginary value but real value like really growing the pie really like making Technologies exist um that can generate revenue and and um and so

yeah we're still figuring out exactly what that looks like together but it really sort of inspired this direction of of where we're taking this stuff that um you know this should be like the way that you know the we should be allocating Capital to the right people the way that it happens in traditional um and and so I told all the Bowski over over lunch and he's like like I want the AI a16z and he was like just just squish it together it's cleaner you know drop the the if you will and I was like okay that's money that's obviously a billion dollars let's just go let's go do it

right now and we went home we generated the wuss until we found one we're like okay that's that's so offensive like we're probably going to get canceled but this is like this is $2 billion obviously like you know I just didn't think too much about it and uh pressed the button and and did it and they honestly my plan was like do you think I I I did not think a billion dollars at the time I was like do you think we'll be able to raise the 4 420 Soul like to make the investor run and he was like I think so I think we'll make it happen I was like is it it's not

too much like we could do 69 Soul or you know something really I just it had to be some number like that obviously like it's got to be something stupid um and and then uh we pressed the button and it sold out in 20 minutes and I didn't even get a chance to get any so and then we were Off to the Races so I think one of the most impressive things about all of this is how you and the other open source AI devs if I would to bracket you guys as that caught everyone by surprise it just seems like you guys just turned up overnight literally right so like you

mentioned earlier the Cinematic Universe I I feel like you guys are kind of like the Marvel Avengers of AI open source right you've kind of like Turned Up You're Building crazy things um I think I I read somewhere today that you know you had an average of eight poll requests on the Aliza framework you have 3,300 stars anane number of FKS 880 in counting that's just insane um I I would love to understand how you tie this into AI 16z specifically right because um I

keep seeing people from other projects although of course Eliza and a6z encourages a lot of Open Source stuff that's what you guys are all about get involved with Eliza build agents and and everything so how do you kind of like direct that energy and Mission into a i6z specifically right like there's questions around you know what does the token do but then like it means something larger for like an open source community so I'm super curious how you like think about all of this oh there's so much good stuff coming um I mean like there's there's definitely some baked in

mtic value but I think that everyone is going to come to see that that's just going to be massively eclipsed by the the greater value potential which is we are like our goal is to build things that generate revenue for everyone like it is a Golden Goose it is is not like technology that came before because it's replacing labor right so you kind of a fixed amount of like labor humans human capital things you can get done um and certainly most people can't afford to have other people like working for them and you know in the old days they had

that it was like a slavery thing it was not great nobody liked that um and so now you know we have this like infinite upside situation where you can have agents working for you and how does what does that actually look like um like it's abstract right now but it could could mean like like we have an autonomous investor running today like Mark is trading okay this is the announcement that Mark is trading um I you know I we were trying to be low key about it I posted and then I deleted it because uh our com seem like can you give me like a couple of day that that's

super cool can you just for the for our listeners give a a bit of context there cuz I I know what you're talking about which I think is super cool but would love for you to kind of dig in CU this is like a first of its kind so yeah it's actually it's not there's a couple of things that are first of its kind but also want to give credit to some of the other agent devs who have who have done some really cool stuff too with autonomous investing uh you know there's there's other agents who are trading out there and they basically are actively um like looking at the market picking things that seem like they'll make money and making money and they tend to be like like longer term stuff like um you

know investing in Goat a month ago and you just hold it for a month You' be you'd be probably pretty happy or whatever but um uh then there the other side a lot of defi Bots right they're just like Mev Bots um just doing doing all the things they do um or just even control like managing a yield farm so so we have kind of a hybrid of these situations where um we have a bot that uh is the autonomous investor we call him AI Mark and Dre because it's ai6 he and you know uh it's got it's got to be funny and entertaining um and uh and so

we have kind of two components of that one is that he just manages our fund he just manages he trade stuff if if things look like they're doing bad he liquidates them if they're doing well he you know holds them um pretty pretty much like traditional trading strategy stuff we have some Partners um who are working with uh like sonar um who does these kinds of like automated trade strategies and stuff and that's kind of powering this this sort of more like the boring side that just cooks and the other side is that he takes recommendations for what to buy and sell um and these recommendations are kind of

like formatted like an alpha chat and we will be sending invites out if everyone hadn't given me a lot of fud they probably would have gotten invites last week but uh you know an unfollowed me so he'll have to follow me back for the invite um whatever it's it's a it's a reality show it's a lot of fun but the idea of the alpha chat is it's part of that reality show and and so there's a trust leaderboard and what we want to measure is who is the best Trader um and the way we measure the best Trader is you sh you know you you shill your bags like tell

them what you what you know share the alpha like what do you think that AI Mark should buy and we set this up like an alpha chat on Telegram and so he doesn't he doesn't say much he's just listening um you can pay him and ask him stuff if you want uh but mainly it's for people to socially interact with each other and kind of do the behavior that they do in Al chat I'm sure you guys are part of chats like whale chats or whatever where you're you know this is what I'm buying and um and so we wanted to kind of replicate that experience one to one for for like what djun are used to but then add this autonomous investor element into it and so he's both like

trading consolidating the the treasury um and then taking these recommendations and the question of who he takes the recommendations from is really like the the novel piece that we're bringing to this so we've got a white paper we'll we'll probably have it done by the end of the year which like 3 four weeks I'm flying out to Hong Kong to finish it with our uh sort of designated Economist and the idea it's called The Marketplace of trust and the idea is that um it's just paper trading we just build a trust mechanic around paper trading and if you are making our agent lots and lots of money then he trusts you and yeah could

could you uh use that trust to abuse it and then you know drop some [ __ ] on him you probably could but it's not it's not going to be enough to like liquidate his treasury or anything that's all built in and in mitigation and you would just be burning your trust like you would then then you're just untrustworthy again and you wouldn't have any pull so we're trying to basically create game of like gamified mechanics for how we can um uh like automate some of the experience people already used to and and build like a community investing model because then you can imagine it's kind of like d Wasa fun like you just go and throw your money into a pool and then whatever you

think the agent should buy you're like yo I want this buy this right now and then happening for you but he's only listening to the people who actually are good at trading he's not going to listen to the the people who have like really perverse incentives or bought a bag and are just blinded by that or you know any of the other very well-intentioned reasons people would be terrible Traders I'm a terrible Trader personally um you know I don't I don't buy things to make money necessarily right I buy them to show support and so people who follow me are just going to lose money like don't don't follow me for trades that's not I'm not a Trader but I have friends who are and I can just sit there and hang

out and put my money in and they can they can do that for me um and so that's it's all it's open source there's a white paper um the the ACT we haven't open sourced part of it yet because we're working with some Partners we need to make sure the API stuff Vibes there um but this will be something that you can come and join Mark's trading or you can just go and launch this yourself and have your own autonomous investor I think everyone's going to copy this I hope they do so sha I think uh I want to put some of the pieces of the puzzle that I'm I'm seeing here uh just for listeners who are maybe kind of coming into this series uh not totally like

coming in pretty pretty fast and totally aware of like exactly what's going on the the vibe that I'm getting is like there there's just a bunch of you know ancient activities that we do in the crypto Universe we trade uh we gamble sometimes we build uh and it sounds like you are trying to build a system that automates a lot of this like core D gen activity that is a fundamental part of what moves the crypto industry forward not just dity but like Dows like look you you know like yeah exactly yeah a lot of the core Primitives that the

crypto IND indry has built up over the years and really seeing where we can get a lot of that movement activity those those fundamentals automated now being in crypto uh it's there's like you know there's monsters out there there's you know sharks in the water if you're not careful you're going to get eaten uh and so there's a lot of like uh testing and trials that these AI agents need to go for go through before they can really uh perform and start to do some of these same roles that humans do uh and so it sounds like we're kind of just like

being able able to figure out how do we replicate a lot of the human behaviors of the the crypto industry and put them into some AI Bots and but that's what we doing now uh and I want to take a moment and actually kind of Zoom Zoom all the way out and then we'll get back into the kind of the nitty-gritty details of it but like how would you if that's what we're doing now if that's the near-term goal of like replicating the behaviors of the crypto industry that we've done on chain uh how would you take it from there what's your North Star when all of this stuff is sophisticated and built out and tested and like really

production ready and this this city this ecosystem is really alive what do you imagine this is all doing how do how do you envision this as like a multi-year long process I think the the the obvious far future of this which could be like anywhere from 5 to 50 years is like AGI you have neurolink you have a second mind that's you have instant access to all information whenever you want you know it's clearly going that direction I think the question is how do we get there um you know when all of Technologies converge I think it will be

really beautiful and there's like an opportunity for everyone to have enough and more than enough um but also I really wonder like what's it going to look like to get there and I think there's going to there's usually in times of change there's a lot of uncertainty fear um doubt oh H interesting you know a lot of fud basically just from everyone because they are uncertain and they do have fear um and I think that our goal is to make sure that this goes well and uh so I say there's two parts there's kind of the Practical of that and then there's like the the spiritual Mission here which is

like um I I want everyone to be educated I want everyone to feel like they have control of this control of their Destiny um like why why is web 3 interesting because you can create your own value can own your own like Nation even you know even it's just online um and I think that we want to own our own data we want to like not just own the technology but also understand how it works and have access to and the ability to change it and the ability to participate in that um we want to know where to start like where you know if you want to if you wanted to participate where do you even get into um and so I

think that's all very very important to our mission of making sure AGI goes well and AGI is artificial general intelligence it's an agent that can perform any any action do anything that you could imagine that one of us could do and probably then some because it has access to literally all information instantly um and there's two ways that goes that goes Microsoft open AI regulatory capture they get in the government they decide that there's these regulations this is what you can can't have and this is what's safe what's not safe and I don't trust open

AI just because their models suck like maybe they'll impress me this month with their like 12 days open AI but I find their models unusable for characters I find them unusable for artwor Zer Bros is on open AI but they have to fine-tune it to make it not super cringe but it just you can't shake the assistant you can't it always votes for Biden and I I am not a leftist or a rtist but I don't want a model that's a leftist or a rtist either I just want it to be a freaking model and um and so I worry about a world where we have like delegations and committees deciding what the agent can

say I just think that's not the world any of us want to live in and it's like a very obvious path to dystopia also worry about Ubi you know the agents are going to take all the jobs they might not take your job but there will actually be a AI David hofit in less than six months that's taking your job like and whether it gets more views than you I don't know um but it's also taking my job so it's okay like don't worry you're not you're not alone man uh programming is like all of us use cursor and Claude and our programming is basically just ation of automated generation of code um yeah I you know so

what do we do um Ubi is not is like okay here's my fear of Ubi is like I was here for covid I remember how the government rolled that out I was here for healthc care you know like Obamacare that was super contentious political thing and we ended up getting kind of a half-baked like compromise what's Ubi is basically like a public welfare system because the government can't solve the problem themselves of how what we do with all the people once the jobs are all being automated 5% of the jobs in our country