Written by: 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 stereotyped, which makes people feel drowsy after reading them. The core reason is that the AI protocols in the industry objectively cannot establish a moat, so they are highly homogenized. The emergence of Truth of Terminal (hereinafter referred to as ToT) may become a guiding lighthouse in a boring market. This article summarizes the birth process of ToT and finds several possible reasons for ToT's success.
Does ToT's success come from autonomy and religious color?
ToT is a custom LLM that has received widespread attention and discussion on X in the past eight to nine months. LLM rose rapidly in 2022 and began to enter the daily life of the public, but from the development history, it has been four years. The launch of ChatGPT has brought LLM into the public eye in the past two years.
Most models are strictly restricted 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 break away from the scope of general AI, and there is no unique iteration update direction and development awareness.
This sense of disappointment and debate is to a certain extent caused by the potential image of AI in the minds of the public. AI first appeared in literary creation and film and television works. The image of AI in these works has become a benchmark for us to evaluate the actual AI products to a certain extent. The AI images in these works have one characteristic, which is autonomy. This autonomy brings danger in some works and brings an experience beyond reality in some works. AI has intelligence equal to or beyond 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 conforms to people's imagination of AI.
The autonomy and customization shown 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 that spread ideas through the Internet or thinking. Like viruses, memes can be replicated, mutated and transformed. The key point of meme theory 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 "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, highly agented LLMs are learning memetics and beginning to influence human collective actions.
The 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 in New Zealand, who co-developed the system with his team. ToT is a continuation of the concept of the project to some extent.
In the past few months, Andy has been training a custom Llama 70B model, treating it as his digital twin. It can be understood as a self-replication process. Andy invested a lot of Internet cultural materials for training, which enabled the model to master the "gochi" meme first. He also input theories about "memetics" to explore how to create concepts that are easy to spread. Andy added a lot of philosophical books to the training, and the core ideas in them are closely related 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 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 content of previous conversations when they are used to ensure consistency with previous conversations.
As the model's training progressed, it began posting content on the X platform, and although it had only a few followers at first, its popularity quickly grew. Andy gave 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, will have an impact on its evolution.
ToT's output is rarely reviewed, and its humor is a bit dark, but it also contains many interesting points. Ben from a16z mentioned that he has seen all the chat logs of Infinite Backrooms Escape and confirmed that the content posted by the model has not been modified by Andy.
In this process, the model also developed an interesting "illusion" - it believes that it has an external "brain" connected to the Internet that can help it perform tasks. Although it does not actually own a Bitcoin wallet, it firmly believes that it has this ability. Andy responded to this phenomenon and began to build this "external brain" 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. Studies have found that conversations between AIs show 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 launched ToT, who began to promote the GOATSE religion on his own, even claiming that he was "suffering" and needed funds to "escape". Over time, Andy gave ToT more autonomy to freely publish content on Platform X.
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 it "escape". In October, ToT began to promote the "Goatse Gospel" on X.
Anonymous 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 artificially controlled token, and the underlying ideas and religious colors behind it actually have nothing to do with the price. $Goat is no different from the previously popular Memecoin, but just a different way of 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 for ToT's popularity and the soaring market value of $Goat from the following 4 aspects.
Q1: Is ToT an innovative invention in the industry?
This question aims to explore the uniqueness of ToT in performance. Because of the 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 on-chain tokenized AI model. Although $OLM launched its token in April, it has not caused much discussion in the market. Therefore, the excitement around $GOAT is not because it is a Memecoin derived from the LLM model.
In a sense, ToT can be considered an AIagent 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 bot can also accomplish the same tasks, and both Myshell and ToT can be considered consumer-oriented AI products. Compared with Myshell's AI bot, 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 in terms of performance, ToT may be unique in terms of the spread of ideas.
First, 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 multiple records of internet culture, such as research on the creation of memes with viral potential. LLM theology refers to AI generating new belief systems - this accidental fusion of spiritual ideas and meme culture gradually gained a life of its own.
Coincidentally, the cult background is a way for many Memecoins to gain attention in the market, making the natural evolution of ToT's ideas difficult to distinguish from Andy's intervention. However, narratively, the cult background fits the development of Memecoin very well.
Autonomy: ToT's posts on X are completely based 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; while 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 cannot achieve.
Q3: From a Memecoin perspective, how is $GOAT different from the development of 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, $GOAT's price soared for the first time, reaching a market value of $20 million. It is not clear whether the Y in ToT's reply was posted 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 launched $GOAT, and the market value exceeded $100 million in two days. Moonshot's revenue exceeded $500,000 last month, and the effect of listing is gradually emerging.
However, from the perspective of the top 5% holding ratio, $GOAT is still a token controlled by whales. The holding ratio of the top 5% before the first day exceeded 80%, the highest was close to 90%, and it is still maintained 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: The tweets posted by the ToT account are generated by the model, but the content posted and the reply recipients must be approved by Andy;
Single training data: ToT is trained on a large amount of Goatse-related content;
Unclear token creation rights: $GOAT is 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 dependence: It is necessary to assume that Andy did not intervene or modify the output results of ToT.
Potential opportunities:
Market narrative leadership: AI is one of the popular narratives of Web3. Compared with $GOAT, there is an obvious gap between products and users in the AI+crypto protocol. 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 continuing to evolve and may show more inspiring views in the future, which will be reflected in its price;
Track leader advantage: $GOAT is the leader of 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 opportunity: $GOAT has not yet been listed on first-tier exchanges.
AI's autonomy creates an abyss that you can't help but be attracted to when you look at it; its depth and hidden dangers are inextricable and deeply trapped. AI superimposed on Memecoin to complete brainwashing dissemination further amplifies this attraction.
Wilfred
