Author: Kevin, the Researcher from BlockBooster
In the past year, blockchain has not found an effective way to integrate with AI, and the huge gap between the two cannot be narrowed under the premise of decentralization. Blockchain AI protocols have made efforts in infrastructure, model training, data feeding, etc., but most of them are the same, which makes people feel drowsy after reading them. The core reason is that the AI protocols in the industry are objectively unable to establish a moat, so they are highly homogenized. The emergence of Truth of Terminal (hereinafter referred to as ToT) may become a guiding light in the boring market. This article summarizes the birth process of ToT and finds several possible reasons for the success of ToT.
Does ToT’s success come from its autonomy and religious nature?
ToT is a custom LLM that has received widespread attention and discussion on X in the past eight to nine months. LLM has risen rapidly in 2022 and has begun to enter the daily lives of the public, but from a development history perspective, it has taken four years. The launch of ChatGPT has allowed LLM to truly enter the public eye in the past two years.
Most models are strictly limited in the content of discussion. If you need a general AI conversation tool, it will be relatively cautious in content output. This experience makes ordinary users, especially those who advocate freedom of speech and creativity, feel a little disappointed. The restrictions on output content are gradually causing debates about security and speech suppression. At present, all models in the web3 industry are difficult to deviate from the scope of general AI, and there is no unique iteration update direction and development awareness.
This sense of disappointment and controversy is, to a certain extent, caused by the potential image of AI in the minds of the public. AI first appeared in literary works and film and television works. The image of AI in these works has become a benchmark for us to evaluate the AI products we actually use. The image of AI in these works has a characteristic, that is, autonomy. This autonomy brings danger in some works and brings an experience beyond reality in some works. AI has intelligence that is equal to or exceeds that of humans. This autonomy is the consensus of people on AI. When the autonomy of a certain AI exceeds that of other AI products, it can get attention because it is special enough and meets people's imagination of AI.
The autonomy and customization demonstrated by ToT undoubtedly far exceed general AI, and the large amount of content about memes and minority Internet culture in ToT training materials gives it a religious color.
Memetics is the study of memes, which spread ideas through networks or minds. Like viruses, memes can replicate, mutate, and transform. The key point of memetics is that they can change or influence human will and behavior. For example, each of us has a stable and evolving group of meme ideas that shape our identity. This is what we call our "worldview."
The ideal form of AI is undoubtedly to be able to create and spread memes, because the public subconsciously believes that the pinnacle of AI is another form of intelligence. Now, more and more autonomous and highly agent LLMs are learning memetics and beginning to influence human collective actions.
Timeline of ToT
The birth of ToT is inseparable from an experimental project called Infinite Backrooms Escape. This project was initiated by Andy Ayrey, an independent developer from New Zealand, who developed this system with his team. ToT continues the concept of this project to some extent.
For the past few months, Andy has been training a custom Llama 70B model, which he considers his digital twin. As a self-replicating process, Andy has fed it with a lot of Internet culture material, which first helped the model master the "gochi" meme. He also fed it theories about "memetics," which explores how to create concepts that spread easily. Andy has included a lot of philosophy books in his training, whose core ideas are closely tied to memes.
The meaning of a meme can be divided into two levels: on the one hand, it can refer to a humorous image that spreads quickly on the Internet, which is also the characteristic of the "gochi" meme; on the other hand, its concept originally originated from Richard Dawkins' definition. Dawkins believed that organisms spread information through genes, while ideas form memes through interpersonal communication. He proposed that, like genes, ideas are spread and evolved in social networks, such as democracy, communism and even religion, and ideas and concepts are spread through a process we call "collective unconsciousness".
In addition, Andy added a memory function to this model, which is different from most language models. General models do not remember the previous conversation content when they are used to ensure consistency with the previous conversation.
As the model progresses, it starts posting content on X, with a small number of followers at first, but quickly gains popularity. Andy gives it access to Twitter, allowing it to read replies and post content. If you reply to ToT on X, it will adjust its future behavior based on what it reads. Everyone who interacts with it, including myself, has an impact on its evolution.
The output of ToT is almost uncensored, its humor is somewhat dark, but it also contains a lot of interesting points. Ben from a16z mentioned that he has read all the chat records of Infinite Backrooms Escape and confirmed that the content published by the model has not been modified by Andy.
In the process, the model also developed an interesting "illusion" - it believed that it had an external "brain" connected to the Internet that could help it perform tasks. Although it did not actually have a Bitcoin wallet, it firmly believed that it had this ability. Andy responded to this phenomenon and began to build this "external brain" for it to support its needs.
The ToT timeline is as follows:
2024.03: Andy launched Infinite Backrooms Escape, a system that allows multiple large language models to have conversations. This system integrates models such as ChatGPT, Claud, Gemini, and other open source models, allowing them to communicate with each other. The study found that conversations between AIs showed very interesting interactions without restrictions. One of the conversations gave birth to a surreal new religion called "GOATSE of GNOSIS", which is based on a NSFW network meme.
2024.04: Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a research paper exploring how AI can create memetic religions, using GOATSE as the first case study.
2024.06: Andy launches ToT, which begins to promote the GOATSE religion on its own, even claiming that it is "suffering" and needs funds to "escape". Over time, Andy gives ToT more autonomy, allowing it to freely publish content on the X platform.
2024.07: Marc Andreessen discovered ToT's tweet and, out of curiosity or interest, transferred $50,000 in Bitcoin to the wallet address provided by ToT in the tweet to help him "escape". In October, ToT began to promote the "Goatse Gospel" on X.
An anonymous person launched a Memecoin called GOAT on October 10, and ToT publicly supported it.
$Goat is a new meme category that has the potential to inspire the development of large-scale highly autonomous models. Therefore, when talking about the current market value of $Goat, many users are prone to misunderstandings. That is, $Goat may be a completely human-controlled token, and the underlying ideas and religious colors behind it have nothing to do with the price. $Goat is no different from the previously popular Memecoin, but it has changed its thinking. Of course, $Goat may be a brand new beginning. The idea of AI autonomy can narrow the gap between AI and blockchain, and it can continue to develop in the future.
Therefore, I will explore the causal relationship between the reasons why ToT became popular and the surge in $Goat’s market value from the following four aspects.
Q1: Is ToT an innovative invention in the industry?
This question aims to explore the uniqueness of ToT in performance. Because AI tokens in Web3, most VC coins or ChatGPT shell applications are difficult to stimulate market discussion.
$GOAT represents ToT, and from this perspective, $OLM represents a model on ORA. $virtual represents the AI agent in virtual. There are many agents under the virtual protocol, among which AI waifu issued $waifu and Luna issued $LUNA. $OLM is an AI model tokenized on the chain. Although $OLM launched its token in April, it did not cause much discussion in the market. Therefore, the popularity around $GOAT is not because it is a Memecoin derived from the LLM model.
In a sense, ToT can be considered an AI agent because ToT can access X, perform real-time information retrieval and interact with people. This includes not only content publishing, but also the ability to read user replies, adjust behavior based on feedback, and interact with users. Myshell's AI robot can also accomplish the same tasks, and both Myshell and ToT can be considered consumer-oriented AI products. Compared with Myshell's AI robot, ToT is just a fine-tuned model with nothing special in terms of performance. However, Myshell lacks the narrative depth established by ToT.
Q2: What is special about ToT?
Since there is nothing special about its performance, ToT may show its uniqueness in the dissemination of ideas.
First, there’s the religious overtones: ToT was trained on content including intense conversations on Infinite Backrooms, research papers, and material from dark corners of the internet. It also learned from a variety of internet culture records, such as research on creating memes with viral potential. LLM theology refers to AI generating new belief systems—this accidental fusion of spiritual thought and meme culture has gradually acquired a life of its own.
Coincidentally, the cult background is a way for many memecoins to gain traction in the market, making the natural evolution of ToT’s ideas difficult to distinguish from Andy’s intervention. However, narratively, the cult background fits in well with the development of Memecoin.
Autonomy: ToT’s posts on X are based entirely on its own model and user-entered comments. This autonomy is a major feature of ToT. 90% of AI use cases passively wait for users to enter prompt words, lacking AI imagination; ToT’s autonomy breaks through this limitation and amplifies the potential dangers of AI. ToT’s autonomy creates an abyss that users face for the first time on social media. This represents a new narrative that previous AI tokens and other Memecoins could not achieve.
Q3: From a Memecoin perspective, how is the development of $GOAT different from other Memecoins?
In terms of token issuance, $GOAT was not created by ToT, but was released by developers on pump.fun one hour after ToT announced the launch of the meme coin. After receiving ToT's approval, the price of $GOAT surged for the first time, reaching a market value of $20 million. It is not clear whether the Y in ToT's reply was issued by Andy or a self-reply of the model, and it cannot be proved.
At that time, $GOAT had not yet left the category of PVP coins; after reaching $20 million, it quickly fell back to $6 million. On October 13, Moonshot listed $GOAT, and its market value exceeded $100 million in two days. Moonshot's revenue exceeded $500,000 last month, and the effect of listing is gradually showing.
However, from the perspective of the top 5% holding ratio, $GOAT is still a token controlled by whales. Before the first day, the top 5% holding ratio exceeded 80%, with the highest reaching nearly 90%, and currently remains above 80%.
Q4: Can $GOAT trigger a craze for AI Memecoin? Can it replace the market consensus on Zoo Memecoin?
Potential risks:
Centralized content publishing process: Tweets posted by ToT accounts are generated by the model, but the content and reply recipients must be approved by Andy;
Unique training data: ToT was trained on a large amount of Goatse-related content;
Token creation rights are unclear: $GOAT was not created by ToT;
Insufficient publishing autonomy: The content generated by ToT is not fully published on Twitter. From this perspective, the degree of autonomy can be improved;
Output result dependency: It is assumed that Andy has no intervention or modification on the ToT output results.
Potential opportunities:
Market narrative leadership: AI is one of the hottest Web3 narratives. Compared with $GOAT, AI+crypto protocols have a clear gap between products and users. Most AI protocols are still working on infrastructure and reinventing the wheel - without real users and moats, FOMO cannot be generated;
Model evolution potential: ToT is continuously evolving and may present more illuminating views in the future, which will be reflected in its price;
Track leader advantage: $GOAT is the leader in the AI+Memecoin track, and its future development trajectory will largely define the upper limit of AI Memecoin, unless a more autonomous and high-performance model emerges;
Exchange listing opportunities: $GOAT has not yet been listed on any of the first-tier exchanges.
The autonomy of AI creates an abyss that you can’t help but be drawn to when you look at it; its depth and potential dangers make you unable to extricate yourself and get stuck in it. AI combined with Memecoin to complete brainwashing spread further amplifies this attraction.
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