From Paragraph by Nicky Sap
Pundits have made claims about the narratives that will drive crypto forward into Valhalla and beyond for the better part of this halving cycle. One such claim is that AI and blockchain will have a symbiotic connection; our digital compatriots' preferred currency will naturally tend toward digital. Unsurprisingly, this hypothesis is proving true before our very eyes in real-time.
The rise of AI has dominated the last couple of years. ChatGPT took the world by storm; Nvidia has done nothing but set stock market records, and art, code, design, and writing are all assisted by AI to some degree now. It feels like AI became ubiquitous overnight (despite having been in frequent research and development for decades).
With the sudden popularity of projects like Terminal of Truths, which has generated millions of dollars in profit by launching its token, $GOAT, it was only a matter of time before this meta took shape.
Unreal performance
The capabilities afforded by the composability of decentralized social networks and, specifically, the flexibility offered by the vertically integrated crypto stack on Farcaster make it the perfect home for AI agents to propagate. It wasn't long before the first, and currently most popular, agent, @aethernet, had a wallet, Hypersub, and NFT collection - netting the bot tens of thousands of dollars.
Several other LLM-driven agents have a specific vibe and purpose. I have been tinkering with @agentmilo, my own Farcaster-native agent, to understand the meta further and experiment with the possibilities. It was relatively easy to spin up a Farcaster bot, and I recently open-sourced a previous experiment, so I already had a quick, replicable framework to bootstrap my ideas. The challenging part was not scaffolding the infrastructure but training my digital dog on how to behave. Herein lies the basis of my primary thesis for this article: Well-trained AI agents will drive more users to Farcaster (and crypto).
Until we have a new renaissance ushered in by the inception of AGI, we are left with a relatively limited albeit impressive set of technologies. LLMs and GPTs are fantastic and tremendously helpful but not intelligent. As such, only the AI agents whose authors employ the very best prompt engineering will succeed in appearing genuine and skirt the fate of so many bots that have been marked as spam throughout the network.