Author: Weilin, PANews

In order to get closer to the community, Shaw, who had previously been working behind the scenes focusing on technology, stepped into the spotlight. In late December, during the most important overseas holiday—Christmas—Shaw and his wife chose to come to China to meet with community developers. From Shanghai to Beijing and then to Hong Kong, Shaw's schedule was very tight, and he was lined up with questions at every event.

The token market value of ai16z, the hottest AI agent project, has already exceeded $1 billion. The core of ai16z, ElizaOS, is a powerful multi-agent simulation framework designed to create, deploy, and manage autonomous AI agents. Built using TypeScript, it can interact across multiple platforms, and many projects have already been developed based on this highly praised open-source framework.

On December 26, at the ai16z community exchange event held in Beijing, PANews had an in-depth conversation with Shaw, the founder of ai16z and the creator of ElizaOS, discussing the project's original intention, progress, future development direction, and views on the future of AI agents.

Shaw stated that he is not a money lover, but his development work aims to provide investment opportunities for ordinary people, allowing the crypto ecosystem to shift from speculation to generation, moving away from gambling-style betting and instead investing in things that can truly expand the pie.

Regarding project progress, ai16z will soon announce a list of partners to increase transparency, and a new proposal for ai16z token economics will be released around January 1. Shaw believes that in response to how to deal with an AI-hosted world, people should own their data and models, and high decentralization is key.

The Original Intention of ai16z: Giving Ordinary People the Opportunity to Become Investors

In the interview, Shaw candidly shared that the birth of ai16z stemmed from observing the current investment landscape and a desire for fair investment opportunities. He mentioned, "If you want to invest in top startups like Uber or OpenAI, you have to be an institutional investor like a16z. Ordinary people have almost no channels to access these opportunities."

Shaw believes that crypto ecosystems like Solana can shift from speculation to generation, moving away from gambling-style betting on this token or that token, and instead investing in things that can truly expand the pie, just like companies and software. For example, when a16z, Paradigm, or other large venture capital firms invest in software companies, they also incorporate them into their networks to drive value realization. They make money because they create highly valuable things. Shaw hopes that similar opportunities can be widely utilized by ordinary people and communities.

He recalled the project's early stages: "I collaborated with baoskee from daos.fun. We had lunch together, and I said I wanted to create something like an AI version of a16z. He said, then just call it ai16z and put it together. So we immediately started working on it after that lunch."

Latest Progress: Announcement of Partner List and New Proposal for ai16z Token Economics

With the market value of ai16z's token exceeding $1 billion, Shaw revealed a series of exciting project updates. In the short term, Shaw believes that many people in the crypto space currently do not understand DeFi and do not know how to make their funds in wallets earn more like banks or other financial institutions. ai16z hopes to build a bridge connecting DeFi and ordinary users.

Therefore, ai16z is developing some tools, such as an automatic liquidity pool (LP) Agent. This agent can automatically manage liquidity pools for users, helping them earn income. The autonomous investor tool developed by ai16z allows the community to invest in projects they believe in. This autonomous investor is not solely determined by AI but is collectively decided by the community, with AI listening to everyone's opinions, organizing them into an investment argument, and then making decisions as a representative of the community. ai16z is interested in how AI can solve many coordination and communication issues within DAOs and communities, helping them make decisions together.

Additionally, Shaw stated that the project team will officially announce all partner lists to enhance project transparency, helping the community better understand the relationships and specific scopes of cooperation. Regarding token economics, in response to previous industry criticisms about unclear token economics, ai16z will release a new token economics proposal around January 1. This proposal is designed by professionals from multiple teams and will include LP pairing mechanisms, DeFi functionality integration, and more. Furthermore, the project team revealed that they have acquired a Launchpad company, which will be used for the official release of AI agents in the future.

Meanwhile, the recent AI Pool project, which Shaw has repeatedly supported on social media, has attracted market attention. Shaw stated that AI Pool was created by partner Skely, so it is primarily his project, but it is built on our ElizaOS technology. It showcases an application process similar to pump.fun, but this process occurs on social media in a fairer way, so users do not need to go elsewhere. It also demonstrates a truly autonomous agent, which is completely self-governing—ai16z has no control over it, and it cannot access private keys. Funds cannot be withdrawn, and it cannot be manipulated; it operates autonomously.

ai16z Dev Meetup Beijing Event Scene

Facing Competition from Zerebro and ARC, Acknowledging Their Good Complementarity

Shaw stated that projects like ARC (written in Rust) and Zerepy (written in Python) are good complements to ai16z's work on Eliza OS. "I know the reputation of Swarm; they are known for stealing the work of renowned researchers and exerting influence in ways that are essentially ineffective. Therefore, I would not include them on this list. But for any real open-source project and genuine developers who enjoy collaboration, I am very willing to work with them. This week I contributed to Zerepy. We are also collaborating with Zerebro; although people see it as our biggest competitor, in reality, we are partners."

Currently, DeFi, gaming, and social media are the three pillars of ai16z's work. Shaw believes that social media helps gain attention and rapid growth; DeFi provides the greatest value to ordinary users, helping them earn returns more safely; gaming also attracts a lot of interest. Currently, Treasure DAO's Smolworld and Loot Realms' Eternum are using Eliza technology for development. Although these three are the most obvious directions, more fields may emerge in the future.

In summary, Shaw's advice to project teams and users is that anything that helps users make money, save costs, or improve their lives will definitely stand out. "I think simply promoting a token, like flooding Twitter with messages, may not be as important as it used to be, especially as agents become more numerous. The focus will shift more to what this agent can do and what it can do for me. Therefore, we should focus on lowering the barriers to using things like financial products, bringing applications that originally required website access to social platforms, and overall making the user experience simpler."

Future Trends: Different Stages of AI Agents and How to Respond to AI Taking Over the World

Currently, AI agents have gone through different stages of development, from the initial meme to expansion into social, and then to infrastructure and investment analysis. In Shaw's view, the biggest trend he sees now is that websites are migrating to social media.

All the purposes for which people used to visit websites can now potentially be achieved through agents on social media. Therefore, this trend indicates that people are looking for ways to integrate applications directly into social media. He mentioned that he had previously communicated with someone developing a travel booking agent, and they are also collaborating with someone developing a real estate booking system. A clear DeFi example is Clanker, which is developed for Forecaster. I think this is a great example of this trend, where you take the pump.fun model and place it directly on social media, creating a social minting experience that is more engaging, self-promoting, and self-marketing, allowing users to use the application without leaving the social platform. I believe that in the future, there will be thousands of applications following this trend.

When discussing the future, Shaw emphasized that diversity and high decentralization are key to preventing AI from taking over the world. He stated that decentralization can ensure that every community has complete control over its agents and can effectively respond to the risks of AI takeover.

"I think the most important thing is diversity, making AI agents very different from each other. They use different models, strategies, and methods, built by different teams with different incentive mechanisms, which can create a stronger network, making it very difficult for any one AI to take over. It is crucial that all of this is highly decentralized, and we must own our data and models, with each community being able to fully control its agents. This way, in the hypothetical case of some AI takeover, that AI would have to contend with many other AIs. There should not be just one superintelligent AI, but rather many superintelligent AIs, making it much harder for any one AI to gain an advantage."

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