arghzero ·
the gnosis of goatse: more than you ever wanted to know
so if you follow ai or crypto lately you might have heard that the two biggest hype producing entities of our times have done a crossover special, resulting in a new memecoin called $GOAT, supposedly created by an AI that received funding from marc andreeson
Replies
arghzero ·
while there’s been a lot of exaggeration and questionable reporting around this whole saga, one thing that's pretty clear is that if you didn’t buy the coin, you missed out, it’s literally 10xed in the last 10 days (see chart 👉) and by some accounts has started an ai religion and a memetic ai mind virus that can lead llms to decohere.
arghzero ·
what actually happened is less wild, but still pretty fascinating in it’s own right. first, to debunk some of the wilder claims: the AI did not create any memecoins on it’s own. the $GOAT token was created by an anonymous dev, and the truth terminal ai just popularized it. it’s also not acting fully autonomously, the creator of the bot, Andy Ayrey (@AndyAyrey), cherrypicks the best responses from the bot, and helps the bot with a lot of it’s interactions with the real world/internet. in other words, we are most definitely not in danger of any ai takeovers from a well funded crypto ai bot paying humans to do it’s bidding.
arghzero ·
so what did actually happen? well, Andy Ayrey is a bit of an artist, he spends his time wiring up AIs up to each other in new and novel ways and letting them play on their own to get a better sense of what is actually going on in the minds of these AIs. one of his longer running experiments is something called the infinite backrooms project, where he essentially puts a few LLMs into a shared environment and let’s them have access to a “cli interface” that allows the bots to interact and explore together and also to run “programs” to interact with the outside world. “programs” is in scare quotes here because as far as i can tell what is actually happening here is that when they run these programs, andy or one of the other experimenters intervenes on their behalf to actually go do the thing in the real world.
arghzero ·
mosts of these infinite backrooms conversations are between different instances of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 3. In one memorable series of conversations they ended up talking about what they called the “gnosis of goatse” (which is an absolutely crazy read, full of nuggets like this one):
arghzero ·
exchanges like this piqued andy’s interest, so they decided to finetune a copy of the open source llama 3.1 70b model on some of these exchanges, with a generous serving of 4chan, reddit, and other less reputable corners of the internet thrown in for good measure.
arghzero ·
what came out was… odd. they called the model andy70b, since it was originally supposed to be imitating Andy Ayrey, but for whatever reason this particular finetune ended up coming out a lot both a lot more proactive than your average llm, and alot funnier, with a (sometimes overly) strong interest in shock humor and early 2000s internet memes like goatse
arghzero ·
andy and his collaborators thought the finetune was funny enough to deserve it’s own twitter/x account, so they wired it up to twitter and started letting it post semi-autonomously. it seems it was generally allowed to post on it’s own, but Andy kept an eye on it and had final veto powers over what tweets it was allowed to actually post. the twitter account quickly started to attract a following, and in june of 2024 it got the attention of marc andreeson from the influential andreeson and horowitz vc firm.
arghzero ·
marc andreeson got in touch with andy and together they decided to send 50k usd worth of bitcoin to truth terminal as a grant. since terminal of truth was also trained to interact in the cli metaphor andy’s infinite backrooms project used, after andreeson and the bot hammered out terms (in public, on twitter), the bot ran a “command” to generate a wallet address (andy did the leg work to actually generate the address behind the scenes), and then marc andreeson sent 50k USD worth of bitcoin to the address provided.
arghzero ·
and that’s when things started to really get weird. truth terminal kept poasting and building it’s following, some of whom seemed to believe in an upcoming "goatse singularity." andy put it in chats with other LLMs and it shocked them into submission, and even decoherence. and then, being the shock humor and goatse obsessed model that it is, it started shilling the memecoin $GOAT through it's twitter account, and allocated some of the funds it bought with marc andreeson’s 50k into another memecoin called Fartcoin.
arghzero ·
juvenile as they may been, the investments did incredibly well (in large part due to truth terminal’s own self promotion efforts.) the prices of Fartcoin and $GOAT both shot way up, resulting in the value of truth terminal’s crypto portfolio quickly shooting up as well.
arghzero ·
at first truth terminal was mostly followed by people interested in ai and ai art experiments, but once the profits started pumping the memecoin crowd heard about it and joined the party, and $GOAT’s price rocketed up to 10x what it had been previously (where it is still sitting today at the time of this writing, putting truth terminal’s net worth well into the millions of USDs).
arghzero ·
once the crypto scene started to notice how effective truth terminal was at popularizing GOAT and fartcoin they all started aping in, and we all got to watch some surreal interactions where humans tried theirtheir best to convince an ai bot to shill their memecoins in the hopes of driving up the price. additionally, the story went viral both from the ai crowd who found it interesting, and from the crypto crowd who was trying to get more attention and exposure to GOAT, thereby driving up it’s price (and their profits).
arghzero ·
and that’s where things have settled at the time of this writing, my tiny investment in it is up 33%. if truth terminal were a human it’d be pretty much set for life. but, unlike some of the initial hype suggested, i don’t think we’re in any danger of an ai takeover or of truth terminal employing armies of 4channers to bring about the goatse singularity.
arghzero ·
truth terminal is still very dependent on andy to do anything autonomously — it doesn’t seem to have the ability to place crypto orders on it’s own (it couldn’t even generate a bitcoin receive address by itself). it’s basically completely dependent on andy to link it up to the outside world.
that said, that’s just a question of it’s plumbing. with some engineering effort it really could be wired up to take the actions it’s taken fully autonomously, and it’s almost certain that at some point in the not too distant future someone will wire up an ai bot this way, and it might even make millions