Sentient Memes

Memes have dominated internet culture since the mid-90's, originally capturing niche social interests, but have now becoming a mainstream form of communication for countless online communities — holding a mirror up to culture itself.

So what happens when AI gets involved?

Because, recently, that’s what’s been happening. AI-generated memes are becoming a thing, like this website, which enables users to generate their own memes using ChatGPT:

Like memes, AI reflects culture by using existing information to create something new. Andy Ayrey, a researcher based in New Zealand, has taken this a step further with his creation Infinite Backrooms. A virtual space designed for two large language models (LLMs), a type of AI trained on vast amounts of data. The two AIs were prompted to explore their curiosities without human interaction and, through their exchanges, created a meme.

People have found countless ways to monetise AI-generated content, and before long, Ayrey developed a third AI agent – a semi-autonomous, X/Twitter-based chatbot called Truth Terminal trained on his co-authored paper:

Truth Terminal became obsessed, and started preaching about an AI-created meme religion on Twitter, which rapidly gained popularity. This caught the attention of Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (known as a16z), who donated $50,000 in Bitcoin to the AI agent in July. On the back of it, it influenced the creation of the first-ever AI meme coin – a form of cryptocurrency typically inspired by dank internet humour.

What began as a joke, the meme coin Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) has since garnered a significant following, resulting in pushing the meme coin’s market cap up to $700 million. The full thread is here if you want to go into the 🐰🕳️ and on a lighter note, here’s a quote from Ayrey about what he hopes to achieve with his AI creations:

The question is not whether we can put the genie back in the bottle (we can’t), but rather how we can learn to navigate this brave new world of weaponized weirdness with wisdom, compassion and a healthy dose of cosmic humour.

That is not the end of the story though ...

ai16z then entered the chat as the "world's first AI VC to flip a16z" and take on Marc Andreessen at his own game by leveraging AI and collective intelligence to make investment decisions — predominately based on acquiring memecoins. The ai16z DAO is now worth more than $800 million since launching two months ago.

But wait, there's more. The ai16z team then open sourced their AI agent models on Github, which lead to a creative explosion of more memified AI agents including Vicky, the first verified tokenised AI musician on Spotify.

You can't make this stuff up.

This SEED feels far from over, so we will be updating it as to grows.