Stanford lab partners with team behind ‘ai16z’ AI agent project

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Eliza Labs, the team behind the ai16z AI agent platform, struck a research partnership deal with Stanford University’s Future of Digital Currency Initiative, Eliza Labs announced this morning.  

For the past two months, so-called AI agents that generally attach chat bots to memecoins have raced to hundreds of millions in market capitalization, including ai16z. By funding a lab at Stanford, ai16z is trying to do what all successful memecoin-linked projects have to do — keep the joke going.

“This is the funniest possible thing,” Shaw, Eliza Labs’ anonymous founder, told me on a call after I said I found the memecoin project and research university pairing amusing. “If I could think of the most entertaining thing that we could do, it would definitely be to start a lab at Stanford.”

Eliza Labs is the entity behind ai16z, which is a DAO whose assets are set to be traded by an autonomous AI bot, jokingly named Marc AIndreessen after the real a16z co-founder. The AI version of Marc Andreessen is built using the Eliza framework, which lets agents interact on social media, surf the web and trade tokens. This AI agent technology is buzzy at the moment: ai16z’s GitHub repository has already been forked some 1,400 times.

Once the platform is public, AI Marc will create a so-called marketplace of trust where he ranks DAO members based on how good their advice is. 

Stanford’s Future of Digital Currency Initiative brings a number of Stanford professors together to produce crypto-adjacent research and “promote the success of public and private digital currencies and their many use cases.” The research lab is funded by crypto industry members like Eliza Labs, who must pay either $250,000 for a Tier 1 membership or $75,000 for a Tier 2 membership. 

Snickerdoodle CEO Jonathan Padilla, a FDCI adviser who co-founded the lab, said Eliza Labs gave Stanford a “larger grant” that exceeded $250,000, though he declined to give an exact number. With its associated ai16z token trading at a market capitalization of over $800 million, Eliza Labs was evidently able to foot the bill. 

Stanford researchers will develop trust mechanisms for AI agents, which are known to hallucinate at times, and investigate how agents can coordinate with and govern each other. 

Stanford professors David Mazières and Dan Boneh will lead the lab alongside a cohort of graduate student researchers, Padilla added.

“At FDCI, we’ve been working on technology that vastly increases the [computational] power of blockchains. AI16Z/Eliza is at the cutting edge of applying AI agents to financial problems. We are excited at the possibilities of increasing the onchain computational power available to their applications,” Mazières said in a message to Blockworks.

Eliza Labs’ Stanford partnership didn’t come cheap, but with the AI agent space currently locked in an arms race for attention, Shaw and the rest of the DAO’s leadership evidently found the partnership worthwhile. The founder also hopes the partnership will produce some good science.

“We’re looking for Ph.D’s to blow our minds and expand the realm of what’s possible with the technology that we’re unlocking,” Shaw said.

Updated Dec. 16, 2024 at 5:29 pm ET: Added comment from Prof. Mazières.

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