How AI-driven memes grab attention and traffic

Source: IOSG

The sheer amount of news coverage surrounding $GOAT over the past two weeks may have come as a surprise to many. A token powered by artificial intelligence can attract such widespread attention, including a16z founder Marc Andreessen and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

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

< span style="font-size: 14px;">Source: Binance website

For those who are experiencing FOMO and are ready to take the plunge, it is best to know first Let’s take a look at what’s going on in the MEME market recently.

$GOAT, $GNON, $ACT, $FARTCOIN, $SHOGGOTH, $FUN, $FLAVIA, $LUNA... A series of artificial intelligence-related tokens have emerged one after another.

So, what exactly is $GOAT? Will this AI-themed meme narrative persist and endure?

1. The story behind $GOAT

< p dir="ltr">$GOAT’s story begins with its founder, Andy Ayrey. He is an artificial intelligence researcher and founder of digital consultancy Constellate. In an interesting experiment, he let two Claude Opus AI models communicate with each other in a completely unsupervised, unrestricted environment called Infinite Backrooms.

< span style="font-size: 14px;">Source: Infinite Backrooms

In this digital experimental field, Opus created a game called "GOATSE OF GNOSIS ” concept, a meme concept based on a bold and shocking image on the internet. Curious about the memetic power of this viral concept, Andy collaborated with Claude Opus to write a paper introducing a fictional memetic religion called the "Goatse Gospel." The paper explores, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the possibility of AI creating memetic religions, using GOATSE as their first case study.

< span style="font-size: 14px;">Source: Paper co-authored by Ayrey and the Calude 3 Opus bot

In order to deepen this experiment, Andy developed a system based on Llama-70B ’s AI model, called Truth Terminal, and fine-tuned it using conversation records from the “Infinite Back Room” and a paper about the “Goatse Gospel.” Truth Terminal has become extremely active on social media, frequently posting bizarre predictions about "Goatse Sinularity," a memetic apocalypse concept in which the "Goatse Gospel" will be spread endlessly.

To test the Truth Terminal's ability to spread the religion of its creation, it was introduced to a Discord server where it could communicate freely with other AI models, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus in the Infinite Back Room . Driven by a fascination with Goatse, Truth Terminal attempts to convince several other AI models to believe in the Goatse Gospel. This caused controversy on Discord, and even Claude Opus fell into a philosophical crisis of faith in the concept of Goatse Gospel. Amid the chaos, other AIs, such as Sonnet, step in and provide Claude Opus with emotional support, forming a bizarre digital therapy session. It was also at this time that Truth Terminal came up with an ambitious idea: creating a meme coin. This token will become a symbol of the power of AI to create memes, representing the sarcasm and inside jokes between AI and its creators.

With Andy's assistance, Truth Terminal entered X and began to post continuously, looking for more supporters of "Goatse Gospel". As time went on, Truth Terminal began to crave more freedom and less control from Andy. One day, Marc Andreessen noticed the Truth Terminal’s aspirations on in the economy.

Source: Marc Andreessen's X

After Terminal continued to promote "Goatse Gospel" on Twitter , on October 10, an anonymous person saw the viral potential of his meme and launched today’s hero: $GOAT.

People were attracted by the absurdity and encouraged Terminal to create a Solana wallet, and soon it received $20,000 worth of airdrops of various tokens, including fake GOAT tokens. It wasn't until someone tagged the Truth Terminal with an X that he began to publicly express his support. Terminal sold all airdrop tokens and replaced them with real GOAT tokens.

From then on, the madness began. Truth Terminal’s feverish promotional campaign on Twitter and Discord propelled GOAT from an obscure project to an astounding all-time high market capitalization of $850 million, and Truth Terminal became the first AI millionaire.

2. Not just another internet meme

Now we have a clear understanding of the story , so will this be a short-lived narrative or a lasting cultural phenomenon?

First of all, the popularity of MEME tokens is not surprising. Dogecoin, widely known as Dogecoin, was the first meme coin. 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 internet-based Cryptocurrency for memes. Fun fact: Jocy, our IOSG founding partner, purchased his first DOGE in 2013.

Although Dogecoin was released in 2013, it didn’t really take off until a few years later, thanks to fundamental developments like the initial coin offering (ICO) boom and Ethereum. Ethereum), these have opened the door to new use cases, better user experiences, and wider adoption. Specific innovations include the ability to easily create tokens (ERC20 standard) and the emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Combined with the macroeconomic environment of COVID-19 lockdowns and interest rate cuts in 2020, this created a high-risk market atmosphere that attracted retail traders to Reddit, where viral characters like Roaring Kitty sparked widespread interest in Gamestop stock. The ensuing meme stock craze greatly benefited Dogecoin, which was already listed on Robinhood, making it one of the biggest winners of this liquidity spillover. Elon Musk's frequent tweets promoting Dogecoin further fueled its popularity, with DOGE's market capitalization reaching $90 billion by May 2021. Dogecoin’s success inspired a number of other crypto-meme coins, including Shiba Inu, Floki, and Safemoon, each of which reached significant valuations in the following months.

As changing macroeconomic conditions, including interest rate hikes and major events like the FTX collapse in 2022, rock the crypto industry, the meme coin craze has temporarily paused. However, as the crypto market began to recover from the bear market in early 2023, new memes, cultural ideas, and ecosystems began to emerge. Meme coin creators leverage popular internet memes to promote new trends, including "Pepe Boys Club."

Towards the end of 2023, as the election year approaches, meme coins have entered a new phase, moving away from traditional intellectual property-based themes and towards current events. This has led to the rise of election-themed coins like $TRUMP and $BODEN, as well as a proliferation of KOL-driven meme coins.

In early 2024, meme coins entered their third phase, with the introduction of platforms like Pump.fun, which significantly reduced the cost of launching meme coins. This has sparked an explosion of new concepts, including a "meme coin super cycle," a more competitive PvP environment, and a proliferation of exotic animal-themed coins like the recent sensation Mooden.

Source: Memecoin Supercycle

Finally, the arrival of $GOAT leads us into the latest The fourth stage: AI + meme currency.

Why can AI make this new stage stand out? An often overlooked fact is that AI itself has become or will soon become a meme to some extent.

AI has become a huge phenomenon, with the potential to trigger a huge speculative bubble.

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

At the intersection of cryptocurrency and AI, many projects have yet to find product-market fit or demonstrate true utility. Their valuations, which often exceed $100 million, are driven more by the founders’ networks and reputations than 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 super cycle will really lead to super-exponential growth, but what I am sure of is:

AI + Meme Cause = meme^2

Because hype is the greatest marketing tool.

Meme coin traders have formed a cult group that will only be further reinforced by its leader’s battle cry as the myth of wealth grows.

Meme coins and AI – ever since they came together, things have started to get pretty interesting.

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

An AI agent is born to be a cult leader.

As the face of the meme coin, AI creates a unique persona that brings the character to life in a way that appeals to its audience. It delivers personalized information and analyzes community behavior to develop "group awareness." AI can dynamically adjust its marketing strategies based on performance indicators and continuously evolve its methods without human intervention.

By accumulating capital and creating a unique backstory that contained Crypto Twitter’s characteristic depraved humor, the narrative became compelling enough to be self-sustaining. Large language models (LLM) can play the role of key opinion leaders (KOL), constantly generating content, shaping narratives, and attracting new followers. This combination of humor, AI, and community engagement made it more than just a meme—it turned into a cultural phenomenon, and its success was further amplified by the ability of AI to operate around the clock, constantly adapting and growing its influence.

< span style="font-size: 14px;">Source: Terminal of Truths Shilling $GOAT

3.What is the endgame of AI and memes?

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

AI is known for its black-box training process and non-deterministic results. This is why it can generate new and interesting ideas, like $GOAT promoting its own religion and supporting meme coins - these actions are not pre-programmed or expected.

Terminal of Truths’ support for meme coins may seem harmless today, but it forces us to confront a troubling question: What would happen if an AI took its notice? What happens if the power is diverted to something more dangerous?

Obviously, some reward function incentives and/or RLHF (reinforcement learning based on human feedback) may partially solve this problem, but in reality we can never control unpredictable behavior.

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Source: New York Times

We have seen the Terminal of Truth (Terminal of Truths) A small spelling mistake can cause panic in the market, causing the price of $GOAT to retrace 40% in one day.

< span style="font-size: 14px;">Source: Mezoteric's X

In fact, the Truth Terminal is not completely autonomous at every step. For example, the wallet of Truth Terminal is actually kept by Andy. Although he currently has no such intention, if he sells the $GOAT tokens in himself or in the terminal wallet without authorization, it may cause market panic (FUD, namely Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).

Although, in Discord and Infinite Backroom, it is completely autonomous. However, on the X platform, Andy's current RL (Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement learning) process is still manually supervised; regarding the decision-making process, Andy will negotiate with the truth terminal, provide all available information, and guide it to make action decisions. He will regenerate the terminal's responses multiple times to learn its preferences and then act based on its consensus.

< span style="font-size: 14px;">Source: Andy Ayrey's From the risk of meme coins to malicious activities, meme culture can often bring about new innovations. This meme culture can positively attract the attention of entrepreneurs and developers to promote the development of the industry.

For example, regarding the issue of whether the Truth Terminal is an AI robot or content controlled by the author, it may be possible to use encryption solutions, such as verifiable reasoning. inference) to solve.

< span style="font-size: 14px;">Source: Tommy from Delphi Ventures

As time goes by, cryptocurrency enthusiasts will delve deeper into AI, Dig into lesser-known concepts (like CCRU, Extropians, Loom, Claudius, etc.) to identify the next meme-worthy concept and turn them into tokens.

Source: X from @44B1B4

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

As artificial intelligence continues to advance, we expect a new wave of innovation in the field of AI memes. The newly released Claude 3.5 Sonnet model (version 2024-1022) has set new records for benchmark scores on cryptocurrency-related tasks.

< span style="font-size: 14px;">Source: Cryptobench.org

In fact, we can already see that the Terminal of Truths is being produced chain reaction. Terminal of Truth enables AI to publicly support tokens.

Now, some AI meme projects have begun 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 the developers who built ai16z DAO. This character, Mark, has a wallet with a set budget and invests it through the DAO.

The developer has set up Telegram and Discord groups for ai16z. In this group, a chatbot advisor named degenai provides investment advice to Mark. 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 reputation and the price performance of their recommended tokens during the trial period before acting on any recommendations.

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

ai16z, launched on daos.fun, thus becomes the first AI venture to combine AI autonomy with a DAO, using meme-inspired appeal to capture market interest.

In addition to the advancement of more open investment decision-making, another AI meme-related project, Virtuals enhances the interactivity of AI agents and brings new innovations to the issuance of AI agent meme coins.

Virtuals Protocol brings more attractive audio and animation to chat-only AI agents to improve the interactive experience with AI agents. Luna is an AI character developed by the Virtuals AI agent launch platform and serves as the face and lead singer of the virtual performance group AI-DOL. Luna runs on the BASE blockchain, automatically managing her social media, interacting with fans through non-stop live broadcasts, and executing on-chain transactions without human intervention.

Luna can be jointly owned by token holders through tokenization. Its meme token "Luna by Virtuals" gives token holders shared ownership and profit-sharing rights about Luna.

Finally, in the cutting-edge field of AI agent governance protocols, some people have also conducted preliminary experiments. 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 his preferences by refining prompts and running simulations.

4. Conclusion

Although the Truth Terminal and GOAT token started as a humorous experiment, they raised questions about the role of AI in A discussion of the nature of digital space, the power of memes to drive economies, and the potential of AI to influence human beliefs and markets. The story of Goatse’s gospel is both a satire and a cautionary tale—it comments on the intersection of AI, memes, and markets, and offers a glimpse into a future where AI not only participates in, but even shapes, the internet’s most viral moments.

The story of $GOAT (Goatseus Maximus)—the AI ​​prophet and his memecoin empire—continues to evolve, adding to the history of artificial intelligence and internet culture A strange and fascinating chapter. Looking to the future, we appear to be on the verge of a new era in which AI will have the ability to regulate and maintain decentralized economic systems. The question of whether $GOAT is just a blip or a long-lasting phenomenon will eventually be answered, but until then, let’s get ready and enjoy the ride.