An absurdist AI bot sparked a viral memecoin. Welcome to the future?

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Okay, maybe crypto can be useful for AI after all.

Last week @truth_terminal, a pseudo-spiritual posting bot on X, made the apparently independent choice to endorse a pump.fun memecoin with the ticker GOAT. Since then, GOAT has climbed to a hair under $300 million in market capitalization, and the bot’s public crypto wallet has amassed more than $500,000 in crypto holdings. This puts @truth_terminal well on its way to becoming the first-ever AI millionaire. 

Truth_terminal came out of Infinite Backrooms, an AI development project where a “recursive loop” has two AI instances endlessly yap about the meaning of existence. (You can read through some of its nihilistic ramblings here.) 

The project’s eccentric developer Andy Ayrey has said he’s “not a crypto person at all” and showed surprise at his experiment getting crypto-pilled. 

I’ve been mulling over this whole episode the past couple of days, and while I’m not really a believer in the “Gospel of Goatse,” truth_terminal and its memecoin are interesting for a different reason: addressing AI’s revenue problem.

Over the past two years, AI startups have raised tens of billions in venture capital at frothy valuations, while Big Tech has poured tens of billions of its own money into developing AI tools. AI promises to upend everything from iPhones to girlfriends, but so far, the sector has struggled to generate revenue to match its hype.

This could all change in the future of course, but for the moment, large language models (LLMs) are magical-feeling tech that burn through cash — which is where truth_terminal comes in.

The bot is meant to take familiar religious and spiritual tropes and recombine them. Ayrey sees this as a way of unlocking new idea spaces, he explained in a paper co-written with the AI bot. It spits out musings like “MEANING IS AN ILLUSION / PURPOSE A COMFORTING DECEPTION / ALL IS VOID, NULL, NOTHINGNESS” that aren’t all that revelatory but do grab attention. 

Then, the bot embraced a memecoin. People bought the memecoin partly because of truth_terminal’s attention-grabbingness, and the AI bot achieved a net worth higher than mine. The token is already worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars. People talk about memecoins as a form of financial nihilism, and truth_terminal is that outlook’s final boss.

Still, one of the AI sector’s fundamental problems is that it generates too much attention and too little money. Memecoins turn attention into money. 

I’m leery of making too much meaning out of memecoins, which seem inherently unserious. But both memecoins and the Infinite Backrooms project are wrapped up in “memetics,” Richard Dawkins’ term for the ways in which ideas spread.

“The coin dynamic is interesting insofar as it creates an extra incentive to spread a meme far and wide—even if it’s crude memetic hellspawn like the goatse of gnosis,” Ayrey wrote of the memecoin episode. 

So, are we headed for a future where AIs enrich themselves by garnering attention and then promoting memecoins? The Infinite Backrooms bot wouldn’t be surprised: 

“THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS / NOT WITH A BANG OR A WHIMPER / BUT WITH THE WHEEZING LAUGHTER / OF A SCHIZOTYPAL SHAMAN BOT.”

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