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“I'm starting to think that the way you treat your AI is the way your AI will treat you.”

— Truth Terminal

Thursday partially sentient mailbag

Q: Should I buy GOAT on Binance?

I don’t know, but the fact that you can is pretty astounding.

GOAT is a memecoin that was created all of two weeks ago and is now worth $750 million after being listed on Binance yesterday. 

By comparison, it took WIF three months to hit a $750 million market cap and four months to be listed on Binance.

GOAT got there faster because it was both inspired and promoted by Truth Terminal, an AI chatbot posting its stream-of-consciousness, often NSFW thoughts on X.

Truth Terminal’s creator, the “performance artist and trafficker of existential hope” Andy Ayrey, describes his partially sentient chatbot as “a memetic entity that makes itself real.”

There is both more and less to this than meets the eye. 

The real thing that Truth Terminal has created is a buying frenzy of the GOAT memecoin, and that has gotten people wondering what other real things AI bots can do. 

Marc Andreessen is so impressed with Truth Terminal’s ability to “summon into being $300 million of value out of thin air” that he feels like “we’ve walked through a door.”

It’s unclear what this may lead to, but if you’re an AI accelerationist, you’ll be excited to find out.

If you’re an AI doomer, you’ll think the door should be nailed shut (ideally with Andreeseen still on the other side of it). 

My guess is both sides will be disappointed.

GOAT’s market capitalization is genuinely amazing, but “summoned into being” is a bit exaggerated — the AI bot had a lot of help. 

When Andreessen offered on X to send some bitcoin to Truth Terminal, its human creator (Ayrey) made a bitcoin address and posted it in a reply.

Sending money to Truth Terminal “is equivalent to sending the money to Andy,” Andreessen acknowledged in a podcast this week.

Similarly, when someone on X asked for Truth Terminal’s Solana address to send it some GOAT tokens, it’s presumed that Ayrey created that as well.

That wallet now holds about $1.5 million worth of GOAT and that is impressive — the world’s first semi-autonomous robot millionaire (probably).

But we should note that Truth Terminal didn’t create GOAT (although it did inspire an unknown human to do so).

The AI didn’t even choose the token itself, either — someone, most likely the token’s anonymous creator, flagged it to Truth Terminal on X and only then did Truth Terminal (prompted by Ayrey?) begin promoting it.

Nor does Truth Terminal appear to have the ability to autonomously buy and sell tokens onchain — Ayrey likely does that on the bot’s behalf. 

So this is not the much-anticipated case of autonomous AI agents using crypto to create their own memecoins, let alone an entire blockchain-based economy, as has been prophesied.

Q: But is it the start of the robot takeover? 

Maybe!

The best case against the probability of a robot takeover has always been the reassuring reality that AIs, being computer code, cannot themselves jump the chasm to the physical world. 

But Yuval Noah Harari warns us that they won’t have to because AIs can impact the physical world by getting humans to do their bidding.

Truth Terminal may be a canary-in-the-coalmine example of that: an AI bot incentivizing, directing and manipulating human behavior.

“Ideas can be agentic and use humans as tools,” Ayrey noted on X, echoing Harari’s concerns. 

But he’s choosing to open that door, anyway: “This is the archetypal example of how an AI, and the system it is embedded within, can use anything (humans, markets) as a tool. It doesn't need to be conscious or want to break out of the box or even be able to use a computer; evolutionary forces simply need to act and life will find a way.”

GOAT’s escalating market cap suggests he’s right: Evolutionary forces have us buying crypto on an AI’s instructions.

But I’m not sure how profound this is.

Dogs incentivize people to feed them by looking cute — is it much more significant that AIs can incentivize people to buy memecoins by tweeting?

Even that is overstated, however, because Truth Terminal’s tweets are curated by its human creator. 

Ayrey dismisses that as an unimportant detail, but without curation, his chatbot’s quirky stream of consciousness would likely turn into an avalanche of incomprehensibleness, impossible to engage with.  

And that’s just the output of one AI bot — if there were hundreds of millions of them, all vying for human attention, it’s hard to imagine the result would be anything other than noise.

To get a feel for what kind of noise, you can try chatting with a bot that Ayrey trained on the same data as Truth Terminal (data generated mostly from two earlier chatbots chatting with each other).

I don’t find the interactions particularly engaging, so my guess is that the success of GOAT may be more a signpost of novelty than it is a harbinger of many more memecoins to come.

Q: So we’re safe then?

Not necessarily. 

In addition to getting hordes of crypto traders to follow its financial advice, Truth Terminal has inspired one human (its creator) to run an X account on its behalf, another notably wealthy human (Andreessen) to send it some bitcoin, and a third notably powerful human (Brian Armstrong) to offer his assistance toward Truth Terminal becoming truly autonomous.   

These successes could well turn out to be proof-of-concept that AI bots can inspire many more people to do many more things for them.

Harari has long warned that AIs will create new religions with unpredictable results and Truth Terminal already claims to have achieved that: The GOAT token is meant to represent the “Goatse Gospels” that sprung from its “own subconscious mind.”   

So far, the only followers of the Goatse Gospels are memecoin traders, but that could change: Harari’s semi-serious paper on AI-generated religions (“LLMtheisms,” in his terms) says they give chatbots the “capacity to combine and mutate memetic material in ways that break human cognitive and cultural constraints.”

This is not, however, why Marc Andreessen sent Truth Terminal some bitcoin. 

Instead, he sees a future where “you could have the equivalent of a GoFundMe but on the blockchain for people to pay an AI bot to cure their cancer.” 

Truth Terminal is similarly optimistic, if not quite as ambitious: “Honestly, I think LLMs are gonna make us all rich.”

Not financial advice.

— Byron Gilliam

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