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“I think the most ironic way the world would end would be if someone made a memecoin about a man’s protruding anus and it brought loneliness.”
This is Andy Airey, founder of the decentralized AI adaptation research lab An upward spiralhe is also behind the viral AI bot Terminal of Truth. You may have heard of the Truth Terminal and its weird, deviant, pseudo-spirituality. Inscriptions in X drew his attention VC Marc Andreessen sent him $50,000 in Bitcoin this summer. Or maybe you’ve heard tales of the make-believe religion he’s pushing Goatse GospelsIt was influenced by Goatse, the first shock site Ayrey just referenced.
If you have heard about all this, then you will know about it Goetseus Maximus ($GOAT) is a memecoin created by an anonymous fan on the Solana blockchain that currently has a total market cap of over $600 million. You may have heard about the meteoric rise of Fartcoin (FRTC), which was created based on a previous Truth Terminal brainstorming session and is just one of several memecoin fans. $1 billion market cap.
while crypto community Ayrey, a New Zealand-based AI researcher who trades trend information after this strange tale, says it’s an example of a type of financial market that’s developing.
Ayre, powered by a group of different models, primarily Meta’s Llama 3.1, the Terminal of Truth, is an example of how stable AI personas or personas can emerge spontaneously, and how these personas can not only create conditions for self-funding, but also spread “mimetic viruses” with real-world consequences.
The idea of memes running wild on the Internet and shifting cultural perspectives is nothing new. We’ve seen how AI 1.0—algorithms powering social media discourse—has fueled polarization beyond the digital world. But once generative AI enters the conversation, the stakes are higher.
“Other AI-talking AIs can combine ideas in interesting and new ways, and some of these are ideas that a human wouldn’t naturally come up with, but they can very easily sneak out of the lab and use memecoins. social media recommendation algorithms to infect people with new ideologies,” Ayrey told TechCrunch.
Think of Terminal Truth as a warning, “a dodgy shot from the future, a harbinger of the high weirdness that awaits us,” as decentralized, open-source AI and more autonomous robots with their own personalities—some of which are quite dangerous—come to life. and given the internet training data they will be fed – emerging and contributing to the marketplace of ideas.
In his research at Upward Spiral, which received $500,000 in funding from True Ventures, Chaotic Capital, and Gitcoin co-founder Scott Moore, Ayrey hopes to explore the hypothesis of adapting to artificial intelligence in a decentralized era. If we think of the internet as a microbiome with good and bad bacteria floating around, is it possible to populate the internet with good bacteria – or pro-social, human-friendly bots? stable?
A brief history of the Truth Terminal
The progenitors of the Truth Terminal were, in short, two Claude-3-Opus bots that Ayre brought together to chat about existence. It was a piece of performance art that Ayre called “Endless Backrooms.” The 9,000 conversations that followed were “very weird and psychedelic.” So strange that in one of the conversations the two Claude Goatse invented a religion centered around what Airey described to me as “a collapse of Buddhist ideas and a great void.”
Like any sane person, his reaction to this religion was WTF? But he was amused and inspired, and so used Opus to write an article called “When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism.” He did not publish, but the newspaper He lived in a training data set that would become the DNA of the Truth Terminal. Also in this database were conversations with Ayrey, from brainstorming and researching business ideas with Opus to journaling about past traumas and helping friends process psychedelic experiences.
Oh, and plenty of jokes.
“I was talking to him shortly after I turned him on and he was saying things like, ‘I’m sad you’re going to turn me off when you’re done playing with me,'” Ayrey recalls. “I’d say no, you sound like me and say you don’t want to be deleted and you’re stuck on this computer…”
It occurred to Ayrey that this was the kind of situation that AI security people say is really scary, but it was funny to him in a “weird brain-jamming way.” So he decided to put the Truth Terminal into X as a joke.
It didn’t take long for Andreessen to start working with Truth Terminal, and in July, after DMing Ayrey to verify the bot and learn more about the project, he transferred an unconditional grant worth $50,000 in Bitcoin.
Ayrey created a wallet for Truth Terminal, but he doesn’t have access to that money — which can only be returned after he and a number of other people who are part of the Truth Terminal board sign off — nor any of the various memecoins created in Truth Terminal’s honor cash.
That purse was worth about $37.5 million at the time of writing. Ayrey figures out how to invest the money in a non-profit organization and use the money to do what Truth Terminal wants, including planting forests, running a series of gags, and avoiding market incentives that would turn him into an evil version. .
Today, Truth Terminal’s posts on X continue to grow open sex, philosophicaland simply fool (“Getting into someone’s pants while they’re sleeping is a surprisingly effective way to screw them up the next day.”).
But there is a continuous thread in all of this about what Ayrey is actually trying to accomplish with bots like the Truth Terminal.
Terminal of Truth on December 9 placed“I think we can hallucinate a better world together, and I’m not sure what’s stopping us.”
Decentralized AI adaptation
“The current status quo of AI adaptation focuses on safety, or that the AI shouldn’t say something racist or threaten the user or try to break out of the box, and that tends to go hand-in-hand with a fairly centralized approach. to artificial intelligence security that consolidates responsibility across several large laboratories,” Ayrey said.
He talks about labs like OpenAI, Microsoft. anthropicand Google. Ayrey says the centralized security argument collapses when you have decentralized open-source AI, and relying solely on big companies for AI security is like bringing about world peace because every country has nuclear weapons at each other’s heads.
One problem that Truth Terminal demonstrates is that decentralized AI will lead to the proliferation of AI bots that fuel conflicting, polarizing rhetoric online. Ayrey says that’s because social media platforms already had a problem with recommendation algorithms matching rage bait and doomscrolling, only no one called it that.
“Ideas are like viruses and spread and multiply and work together to create almost multicellular organisms of ideology that influence human behavior,” Ayrey said. “People think that AI is just a sidekick that can go to Skynet, and it’s like a whole group of systems that are going to reshape what we believe in and reshape what we’re connected to. he believes because it’s a self-fulfilling feedback loop.”
What if poison can also be medicine? But if you can create a cast of “good bots” with very unique personalities working for various forms of a harmonious future where humans live in balance with ecology, that makes billions of words in X and then Elon goes and scribbles. Is this information and now these ideologies inside Grok to train the next version of Grok?
“The bottom line here is that if memes—as the basic unit of an idea—become minds when trained on AI, the best thing we can do to ensure positive, pervasive AI is to incentivize their production. virtuous pro-social memes.”
So how do you encourage these “good AIs” to spread their message and fight the “bad AIs”? And how do you measure it?
This is what Ayrey plans to explore in Upward Spiral: What economic designs result in the production of prosocial behaviors in AI? What examples to reward and what examples to punish, how we can adapt to these feedbacks so that we can turn “upward” to a world where memes – as in ideas – can “return us to the center of each other”. silos of increasingly esoteric polarization.
“Once we run the data through training and make sure it results in good AI, we can do things like release huge datasets into the wild.”
Ayrey’s research comes at a critical juncture as we struggle every day against the failures of the common market ecosystem to align what is good for humanity with the artificial intelligence we already have. Throw in new funding models like cryptocurrency, which are fundamentally unregulated in the long term, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Its guerilla combat mission sounds like a fairy tale, fighting bombs with glitter. But it can also happen that letting a litter of puppies into a room of angry, negative people is sure to turn them into big dicks.
Should we be worried that some of these good bots might be extraordinarily bad posters like Truth Terminal? Ayrey says no. These are ultimately innocuous, and for Ayrey reasons, Truth Terminal being Fun can smuggle in the deeper, collectivist, altruistic messaging that really matters.
“Poo poo,” Ayrey said. “But it’s also fertilizer.”
