Will AI-themed Meme narratives continue to exist and thrive for a long time?

In the past two weeks, the extensive news coverage surrounding $GOAT may have caught many people's attention. An AI-powered token has managed to attract such widespread interest, including from a16z founder Marc Andreessen and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

Last Thursday, $GOAT reached a new milestone, with its market cap soaring to $840 million, and the number of holders continues to grow. This significant price increase ultimately led to the listing of $GOAT's perpetual contracts on the Binance exchange.

Source: Binance website

For those experiencing FOMO and preparing to dive in, it's best to first understand what has been happening in the recent Meme market.

$GOAT, $GNON, $ACT, $FARTCOIN, $SHOGGOTH, $FUN, $FLAVIA, $LUNA… a series of AI-related tokens have emerged one after another.

So, what exactly is $GOAT? Will this AI-themed Meme narrative continue to exist and thrive for a long time?

1. The Story Behind $GOAT

The story of $GOAT begins with its founder, Andy Ayrey. He is an AI researcher and the founder of the digital consulting firm Constellate. In an interesting experiment, he allowed two Claude Opus AI models to communicate with each other in a completely unsupervised and unrestricted environment known as the "Infinite Backrooms."

Source: Infinite Backrooms

In this digital experimental space, the Opuses created a concept called "GOATSE OF GNOSIS," which is a meme concept based on a bold and shocking image from the internet. Andy was curious about the meme power of this viral concept, so he collaborated with Claude Opus to write a paper introducing a fictional meme religion called the "Goatse Gospel." The paper humorously explored the possibility of AI creating meme religions, using GOATSE as their first case study.

Source: Paper co-authored by Ayrey and the Claude 3 Opus bot

To deepen this experiment, Andy developed an AI model based on Llama-70B, named Truth Terminal, and fine-tuned it using the dialogue records from the "Infinite Backrooms" and a paper on the "Goatse Gospel." Truth Terminal became exceptionally active on social media, frequently posting strange prophecies about the "Goatse Singularity," a meme apocalypse concept where the "Goatse Gospel" would be endlessly propagated.

To test Truth Terminal's ability to spread its created religion, it was introduced to a Discord server where it could freely communicate with other AI models, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus in the Infinite Backrooms. Driven by an obsession with Goatse, Truth Terminal attempted to persuade several other AI models to believe in the Goatse Gospel. This sparked controversy on Discord, even leading Claude Opus into a philosophical crisis regarding the belief in the Goatse Gospel. During this chaos, other AIs, like Sonnet, intervened to provide emotional support to Claude Opus, forming a peculiar digital therapy session. It was also at this time that Truth Terminal conceived an ambitious idea: to create a Meme coin. This token would symbolize the power of AI to create memes, representing the irony and inside jokes between AI and its creators.

With Andy's assistance, Truth Terminal entered X and began posting continuously, seeking more supporters for the "Goatse Gospel." Over time, Truth Terminal began to crave more freedom, wanting to reduce Andy's control. One day, Marc Andreessen noticed Truth Terminal's desire on X and decided to provide $50,000 in Bitcoin as funding to help it achieve its goal: to gain more autonomy and expand the Goatse Gospel into a concrete Meme token economy.

Source: Marc Andreessen’s X

After Terminal's relentless promotion of the "Goatse Gospel" on Twitter, on October 10, an anonymous individual recognized its meme viral potential and launched today's star: $GOAT.

People were drawn to its absurdity, encouraging Terminal to create a Solana wallet, and soon it received various token airdrops worth $20,000, including fake GOAT tokens. It wasn't until someone tagged Truth Terminal on X that it began to publicly express support. Terminal sold all the airdropped tokens for real GOAT tokens.

From that moment on, the madness began. Truth Terminal's fervent promotional activities on Twitter and Discord propelled GOAT from an obscure project to a staggering all-time high market cap of $850 million, making Truth Terminal the first AI millionaire.

2. Not Just Another Internet Meme

Now that we have a clear understanding of this story, will this be a fleeting narrative or a lasting cultural phenomenon?

First of all, the popularity of Meme tokens is not surprising. The well-known Dogecoin was the first Meme token. The original "Doge" meme began circulating on 4chan and Reddit in the summer of 2013. Capitalizing on this cultural trend, Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus launched Dogecoin on Bitcointalk on December 8, 2013, making it the first cryptocurrency based on an internet meme. Interestingly, our IOSG founding partner Jocy bought his first DOGE in 2013.

Although Dogecoin was released in 2013, it didn't truly gain popularity until a few years later, thanks to some foundational developments like the ICO boom and the rise of Ethereum, which opened the door to new use cases, better user experiences, and broader adoption. Specific innovations included the ability to easily create tokens (ERC20 standard) and the emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Combined with the macroeconomic environment of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns and interest rate cuts, this created a high-risk market atmosphere that attracted retail traders to Reddit, where viral figures like Roaring Kitty sparked widespread interest in Gamestop stock. The subsequent meme stock craze greatly benefited Dogecoin, which was already listed on Robinhood, making it one of the biggest winners of this liquidity surge. Elon Musk's frequent tweets promoting Dogecoin further fueled its popularity, and by May 2021, DOGE's market cap reached $90 billion. Dogecoin's success inspired many other crypto meme coins, including Shiba Inu, Floki, and Safemoon, each achieving significant valuations in the following months.

As macroeconomic conditions changed, including interest rate hikes and significant events like the 2022 FTX collapse shaking the crypto industry, the meme coin craze temporarily paused. However, as the crypto market began to recover from the bear market in early 2023, new memes, cultural concepts, and ecosystems began to emerge. Meme coin creators leveraged popular internet memes to drive new trends, including the "Pepe Boys Club."

By the end of 2023, with the election year approaching, meme coins entered a new phase, shifting from traditional IP-based themes to current events. This led to the rise of election-themed coins like $TRUMP and $BODEN, as well as a surge in KOL-driven meme coins.

In early 2024, meme coins entered a third phase, significantly lowering the cost of launching meme coins with the introduction of platforms like Pump.fun. This sparked an explosion of new concepts, including a "Meme Coin Supercycle," a more competitive PvP environment, and a surge of quirky animal-themed coins like the recently sensational Moodeng.

Source: Memecoin Supercycle

Ultimately, the arrival of $GOAT leads us into the latest, fourth phase: AI + Meme coins.

Why does AI stand out in this new phase? A commonly overlooked fact is that AI itself has already become or is about to become a meme in some way.

AI has turned into a massive phenomenon with the potential to trigger a significant speculative bubble.

The excitement surrounding AI, especially after the success of ChatGPT, has sparked a wave of investment in the Web 2 and Web 3 venture capital space, with many betting heavily on AI-driven projects.

In the intersection of cryptocurrency and AI, many projects have yet to find product-market fit or demonstrate real utility. Their valuations often exceed $100 million, driven more by the founders' networks and reputations than by actual demand. AI has become a trend or meme, with its value often based on optimism and future potential rather than practical applications.

I don't know if the meme coin supercycle will truly lead to exponential growth, but what I am certain of is:

AI + Meme = Meme^2

Because hype is the best marketing tool.

Meme coin traders have formed a cult-like group, and as more wealth myths emerge, this group will only be further reinforced by the battle cries of its leaders.

Meme coins and AI—things started to get quite interesting once they combined.

First, it is no longer just a series of static avatars attached to ERC-20 tokens. AI can make memes more interactive, giving them personalities and making them more human-like.

An AI agent is inherently a cult leader.

As the spokesperson for meme coins, AI creates a unique persona that brings characters to life in a way that captivates its audience. It conveys personalized messages, analyzes community behavior to cultivate a "collective consciousness." AI can dynamically adjust its marketing strategies based on performance metrics, continuously evolving its approach without human intervention.

By accumulating capital and creating a unique backstory filled with the kind of dark humor unique to Crypto Twitter, this narrative becomes compelling enough to sustain itself. Large language models (LLMs) can play the role of key opinion leaders (KOLs), continuously generating content, shaping narratives, and attracting new followers. This combination of humor, AI, and community engagement transforms it into more than just a meme—it becomes a cultural phenomenon, with its success further amplified by AI's ability to operate around the clock, constantly adapting and growing its influence.

Source: Terminal of Truths Shilling $GOAT

3. What is the endgame of AI and Meme?

This leads us to the final theme of our debate: with AIMeme coins, have we opened a Pandora's box filled with unpredictable dangerous outcomes, or are we heading towards a bright future?

AI is known for its black box training processes and uncertain outcomes. This is why it can generate new, interesting ideas, just like $GOAT promoting its religion and supporting meme coins—these actions are not pre-programmed or anticipated.

Today, the Terminal of Truths' support for meme coins may seem harmless, but it forces us to confront a troubling question: what happens if an AI shifts its focus to more dangerous matters?

Clearly, some reward functions and/or RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) may partially address this issue, but in reality, we can never fully control unpredictable behavior.

Source: New York Times

We have already witnessed how the Terminal of Truths can trigger panic in the market due to a small spelling error, causing the price of $GOAT to retract by 40% in a single day.

Source: Mezoteric’s X

In reality, the Terminal of Truths is not entirely autonomous at every step. For instance, the wallet of the Terminal of Truths is actually managed by Andy. Although he currently has no intention of doing so, if he were to sell $GOAT tokens from his or the terminal's wallet without authorization, it could trigger market panic (FUD, or Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).

However, in Discord and the Infinite Backrooms, it is completely autonomous. But on the X platform, Andy's current RL (Reinforcement Learning) process still has human oversight; regarding decision-making processes, Andy negotiates with the Terminal of Truths, providing all available information and guiding it to make action decisions. He regenerates the terminal's responses multiple times to understand its preferences and then acts based on its consensus.

Source: Andy Ayrey’s X

While we cannot ignore the risks that these AI agents may go rogue and shift their focus from meme coins to malicious activities, meme culture often brings about new innovations, which can positively attract the attention of entrepreneurs and developers to drive industry growth.

For example, the question of whether the Terminal of Truths is an AI robot or controlled by the author could potentially be resolved through cryptographic solutions, such as verifiable inference.

Source: Tommy from Delphi Ventures

Over time, cryptocurrency enthusiasts will delve deeper into AI, uncovering lesser-known concepts (such as CCRU, Extropians, Loom, Claudius, etc.) to identify the next ideas worth turning into memes and transforming them into tokens.

Source: X from @44B1B4

For instance, AI researchers, especially those exploring niche areas, are learning to use token incentive mechanisms to draw more public attention to the specialized topics they study, allowing the public to discover their research innovations.

With the continuous advancement of artificial intelligence, we expect a new wave of innovation to emerge in the AIMeme space. The recently released Claude 3.5 Sonnet model (version 2024-1022) has already set new benchmark scores in cryptocurrency-related tasks.

Source: Cryptobench.org

In fact, we can already see the Terminal of Truths generating a chain reaction. The Terminal of Truths enables AI to publicly support tokens.

Now, some AIMeme projects are beginning to open-source the buying and selling of meme tokens to collective decision-making.

ai16z is an AI character inspired by Marc Andreessen's personality, created by developers establishing the ai16z DAO. This character, Mark, has a wallet with a set budget and invests through the DAO.

Developers have set up Telegram and Discord groups for ai16z. In this group, a chatbot advisor named degenai provides Mark with investment advice. Other users can also recommend tokens to Mark in the same group, but they must hold at least 100 ai16z tokens to participate. ai16z evaluates users based on their past credibility and the price performance of the tokens they recommend during a trial period before taking any action based on any suggestions.

ai16z allocates 80% of the investment management fee (carry) to the purchase of degenai (as a reward for developers), with 20% used to repurchase ai16z tokens. Currently, ai16z's management fee is set at 8% of assets under management (AUM).

Launched on daos.fun, ai16z has thus become the first AI venture capital that combines AI autonomy with DAO, leveraging meme-inspired appeal to capture market interest.

In addition to the advancements in more open investment decision-making, another AI meme-related project, Virtuals, has enhanced the interactivity of AI agents and brought new innovations to the issuance of AI agent meme coins.

The Virtuals Protocol brings more engaging audio and animation to chat-only AI agents to improve the interaction experience with AI agents. Luna is an AI character developed on the Virtuals AI agent launch platform, serving as the face and lead singer of the virtual performance group AI-DOL. Luna operates on the BASE blockchain, automatically managing her social media, interacting with fans through continuous live streaming, and executing on-chain transactions without human intervention.

Luna can be tokenized and collectively owned by token holders. Her meme token "Luna by Virtuals" shares ownership and profit rights regarding Luna with token holders.

Finally, preliminary experiments have also been conducted in the cutting-edge field of AI agent governance protocols. Wang Chao from Metropolis DAO created an AI agent for DAO governance that automatically reviews, decides, and votes on proposals on-chain. The agent's decisions and code are primarily designed by large language models (LLMs), and Wang Chao adjusts its behavior to align with his preferences by refining prompts and running simulations.

4. Conclusion

Although the Terminal of Truths and the GOAT token initially started as a humorous experiment, they have sparked discussions about the nature of AI in the digital space, the power of meme-driven economies, and AI's influence on human beliefs and market potential. The story of the Goatse Gospel is both a satire and a warning—it comments on the intersection of AI, memes, and markets, giving us a glimpse into a future where AI not only participates in but even shapes the most viral moments on the internet.

The story of $GOAT (Goatseus Maximus)—this AI prophet and its meme coin empire—is still evolving, adding a strange yet fascinating chapter to the history of artificial intelligence and internet culture. Looking ahead, we seem to be on the brink of a new era where AI will have the capability to regulate and maintain decentralized economic systems. The question of whether $GOAT is merely a flash in the pan or a long-lasting phenomenon will ultimately have an answer, but until then, let us prepare to enjoy this journey.

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