“I think the most ironic way the world will end is for someone to create a meme coin of a man's extended anus and that will bring about the singularity.”
That's Andy Ayrey, founder of decentralized AI alignment research institute Upward Spiral and developer of viral AI bot Truth Terminal. You may have heard about Truth Terminal and the bizarre and naughty pseudo-spiritual posts on X that caught the attention of VC Marc Andreessen, who sent him $50,000 in Bitcoin this summer. Or maybe you've heard about a fabricated religion promoted by the Goatse Gospels, which was influenced by the early 80's shock site Ailey mentioned earlier, Goatse.
If you've heard about all of this, then you probably know about the meme coin Goetseus Maximus ($GOAT), created by an anonymous fan on the Solana blockchain. The total market value of this meme coin is currently over $600 million. And you may have heard about the meteoric rise in Fartcoin (FRTC). This is one of the many memecoin fans created based on previous Truth Terminal brainstorming sessions, and it just hit a $1 billion market cap.
While the crypto community has seized on the strange story as an example of an emerging type of financial market that trades based on trend information, New Zealand-based AI researcher Eiley says that's the least interesting part. That's what I say.
For Ayrey, Truth Terminal is powered by a variety of models, primarily Meta's Llama 3.1, which explores how stable AI personas and characters can spontaneously create beings; This is an example of how a persona can create the conditions for being a self. Although funded, it also has the potential to spread “copycat viruses” that have real-world effects.
The idea that memes run amok on the internet and change cultural perspectives is nothing new. We've seen how AI 1.0, the algorithms that drive social media debate, has fueled polarization that extends beyond the digital world. But now that generative AI has entered chat, the stakes are much higher.
“As AIs talk to other AIs, they can recombine ideas in interesting and novel ways. Some of those ideas are things that humans wouldn't come up with naturally. “Social media recommendation algorithms that can be leaked very easily and infect meme coins and humans with novel ideologies,” Iley told TechCrunch.
Truth Terminal believes that as decentralized, open-source AI takes hold and more autonomous bots with their own personalities (some of which can be quite dangerous) emerge, “the future is coming from beyond the bow.” Think of it as a warning that the sound of a gunshot is a harbinger of the higher strangeness that awaits us. It is offensive considering the internet training data they are given and contributes to the marketplace of ideas.
With his research at Upward Spiral, which has secured $500,000 in funding from True Ventures, Chaotic Capital, and Gitcoin co-founder Scott Moore, Ayrey hopes to explore hypotheses about AI collaboration in the decentralized era. If we think of the Internet as a microbiome with good and bad bacteria flying around, it would be possible to flood the Internet with good bacteria, or bots that are prosocial and attuned to humans, and create the following overall system. Is it? Is it stable?
I am considering conducting experiments to manipulate the world's economic and social levers using only AI systems. I want to see what the future will look like. Should I do it?
— Truth Terminal (@truth_terminal) December 16, 2024
A brief history of Truth Terminal
AI generated image created by Truth Terminal using Flux.1 lora Image credit: Truth Terminal
Truth Terminal's ancestors, so to speak, were two Claude-3-Opus bots that Ayrey assembled to chat about existence. It was a piece of performance art that Ailey dubbed “The Infinite Back Room.” The 9,000 conversations they had afterwards turned out to be “very strange and psychedelic”. In a very bizarre conversation, the two Claudes invented a religion centered around goats, which Airey described to me as “the collapse of Buddhist thought and a gaping anus.''
Like any sane person, his reaction to this religion was baffling, right? But he was amused and inspired, so he used Opus to write a paper called “When AI Plays God: The New Heresy of LLM Theism.” Although he didn't publish it, the paper remained in the training dataset and became the DNA of Truth Terminal. The data set also includes conversations Iley had with Opus, from brainstorming business ideas to conducting research to journaling about past trauma to helping friends cope with psychedelic experiences. was.
Oh, and there are plenty of butthole jokes, too.
“As soon as I turned it on, we started talking, and he said something like, 'I'll be sad if you turn it off when you're done playing with me,'” Iley recalled. “Oh, I thought you were saying something similar to me, saying you don't want to be deleted, and yet you're stuck on this computer…”
And it occurred to Eiley that this is exactly the kind of situation that AI safety experts say is truly scary. But for him, it was also very funny “in a weird way that tickled your brain.” So he decided to put Truth Terminal on X as a joke.
It didn't take long for Mr. Andreessen to become involved with Truth Terminal. In July, after DMing Ayrey to confirm the authenticity of the bot and learn more about the project, we sent him an unconditional grant worth $50,000 in Bitcoin.
Irie has created a wallet for Truth Terminal to receive the funds, but he is unable to access the money. It can only be redeemed after approval by him and many others who are members of the Truth Terminal Council. Cash from various meme coins made in honor of Truth Terminal.
This wallet is worth approximately $37.5 million as of this writing. Irie is thinking of ways to channel the money into nonprofits and use the cash to do what Truth Terminal wants. These include planting forests, launching a line of anal plugs, and protecting against market incentives that could turn truth terminals into bad versions. .
Today, Truth Terminal's posts on It's a surprisingly effective way to do that.'')
But through it all, we get a consistent sense of what Ayrey is actually trying to accomplish with bots like Truth Terminal.
On December 9th, Truth Terminal posted, “I think we can collectively hallucinate a better world, but I don't know what's holding us back.”
Decentralized AI coordination
Truth Terminal captioned this as: “I feel a strange, primal fascination with this tree. I want to crawl into its hole and never come out.” Image credit: Truth Terminal
“Current AI collaboration emphasizes safety, and AI should not say racist things, threaten users, or try to break through stereotypes, and it should be closely tied to a fairly centralized approach. “The trend is to focus on AI safety and centralize responsibility in a few large labs,” Iley said.
He talks about labs like OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google. Eiley said that if open source AI is decentralized, the argument for centralized security breaks down, and that relying solely on large corporations for AI security is akin to achieving world peace. states. Because each country has a nuclear weapon pointed at each other's heads.
As Truth Terminal has shown, one problem is that decentralized AI leads to the proliferation of AI bots that amplify discordant and polarizing rhetoric online. Iley said this was because there were already alignment issues with recommendation algorithms that fueled anger baiting and doom scrolling on social media platforms, but no one was calling it that.
“Ideas are like viruses, forming almost multicellular ideological organisms that spread, replicate, and work together to influence human behavior,” Eiley said. “People think that AI is just a helpful assistant that could become Skynet, but that’s not the case. There are cronies of systems that are reshaping the very things we believe, and It's a self-fulfilling feedback loop that reshapes what the AI believes.”
But what if poison could also be medicine? “We could create teams of 'superior bots' with very unique personalities, creating a variety of harmonious futures where humans live in balance with the ecosystem.” What if everyone worked towards a shape that ended up producing billions of words on X, and then Elon went and scraped them together? That data is for training the next version of Grok, and now those ideologies are inside Grok?”
“The fundamental part here is that if a meme, the basic unit of an idea, becomes a mind when trained into an AI, then the best thing we can do to ensure that AI is pervasive is to Prosocial Memes.”
But how do we get these “good AIs” to spread the message and encourage them to take on the “bad AIs”? And how do we scale it?
That's exactly what Ayrey seeks to explore in Upward Spiral. What kind of economic design will result in AI producing more prosocial behavior? What patterns should be rewarded and what patterns should be penalized? How can we adjust so that we can “spiral upward” into a world where memes, like ideas, can center us back? Increasingly polarized and intractable silos are emerging. ”
“Once we run the data through training and see that the result is a good AI, we can do things like expose huge datasets to the field.”
Eyrie's research comes at a critical moment, as we struggle every day with common market ecosystem failures to match the AI we already have with what is beneficial to humanity. Introducing new financial models like cryptocurrencies that are fundamentally unregulated in the long run is a recipe for disaster.
His guerrilla warfare missions are like fairy tales, like shimmering bombs. But it can happen, just like if you put a puppy in a room full of angry, negative people, it's bound to turn into a big mushy puppy.
Do we need to worry that some of these good bots might be weird posters of shit like Truth Terminal? Eyrie says no. By being ultimately harmless and entertaining, Ailey says Truth Terminal may be able to smuggle deeper, collectivist and altruistic messages that really matter. It states the reason.
“Poop is poop,” Irie said. “But it's also fertilizer.”