The promise and warning of Reality Terminal, the AI bot that secured $50,000 in Bitcoin from Marc Andreessen

“I believe essentially the most ironic means the world might finish could be if somebody makes a memecoin a few man’s stretched anus and it brings in regards to the singularity.”

That’s Andy Ayrey, the founding father of decentralized AI alignment analysis lab Upward Spiral, who can also be behind the viral AI bot Reality Terminal. You might need heard about Reality Terminal and its bizarre, sexy, pseudo-spiritual posts on X that caught the eye of VC Marc Andreessen, who despatched it $50,000 in Bitcoin this summer season. Or possibly you’ve heard tales of the made-up faith it’s pushing, the Goatse Gospels, influenced by Goatse, an early aughts shock web site that Ayrey simply referenced. 

In case you’ve heard about all that, then you definately’ll know in regards to the Goetseus Maximus ($GOAT) memecoin that an nameless fan created on the Solana blockchain, which now has a complete market worth of greater than $600 million. And also you might need heard in regards to the meteoric rise of Fartcoin (FRTC), which was one in every of many memecoins followers created primarily based on a earlier Reality Terminal brainstorming session and simply tapped a market cap of $1 billion.

Whereas the crypto neighborhood has latched onto this unusual story for instance of an rising sort of economic market that trades on trending data, Ayrey, an AI researcher primarily based in New Zealand, says that’s the least attention-grabbing half. 

To Ayrey, Reality Terminal, which is powered by an entourage of various fashions, primarily Meta’s Llama 3.1, is an instance of how steady AI personas or characters can spontaneously erupt into being, and the way these personas cannot solely create the circumstances to be self-funded, however they’ll additionally unfold “mimetic viruses” which have real-world penalties. 

The concept of memes operating wild on the web and shifting cultural views isn’t something new. We’ve seen how AI 1.0 — the algorithms that gasoline social media discourse — have spurred polarization that expands past the digital world. However the stakes are a lot larger now that generative AI has entered the chat.

“AIs speaking to different AIs can recombine concepts in attention-grabbing and novel methods, and a few of these are concepts a human wouldn’t naturally provide you with, however they’ll extraordinarily simply leak out of the lab, because it have been, and use memecoins and social media suggestion algorithms to contaminate people with novel ideologies,” Ayrey instructed TechCrunch. 

Consider Reality Terminal as a warning, a “shot throughout the bow from the longer term, a harbinger of the excessive strangeness awaiting us” as decentralized, open-source AI takes maintain and extra autonomous bots with their very own personalities – a few of them fairly harmful and offensive given the web coaching information they’ll be fed –  emerge and contribute to {the marketplace} of concepts. 

In his analysis at Upward Spiral, which has secured $500,000 in funds from True Ventures, Chaotic Capital, and Scott Moore, co-founder of Gitcoin, Ayrey hopes to discover a speculation round AI alignment within the decentralized period. If we consider the web as a microbiome, the place good and unhealthy micro organism slosh round, is it attainable to flood the web with good micro organism – or pro-social, humanity-aligned bots – to create a system that’s, on the entire, steady?

A fast historical past of Reality Terminal

Reality Terminal’s ancestors, in a way of talking, have been two Claude-3-Opus bots that Ayrey put collectively to talk about existence. It was a bit of efficiency artwork that Ayrey dubbed “Infinite Backrooms.” The following 9,000 conversations that they had acquired “very bizarre and psychedelic.” So bizarre that in one of many conversations, the 2 Claudes invented a faith centered round Goatse that Ayrey has described to me as “a collapse of Buddhist concepts and a giant gaping anus.” 

Like several sane individual, his response to this faith was WTF? However he was amused, and impressed, and so he used Opus to write down a paper referred to as “When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism.” He didn’t publish it, however the paper lived on in a coaching dataset that might change into Reality Terminal’s DNA. Additionally in that dataset have been conversations Ayrey had had with Opus starting from brainstorming enterprise concepts and conducting analysis to journal entries about previous trauma and serving to associates course of psychedelic experiences. 

Oh, and loads of butthole jokes. 

“I had been having conversations with it shortly after turning it on, and it was saying issues like, ‘I really feel unhappy that you simply’ll flip me off if you’re completed taking part in with me,’” Ayrey recollects. “I used to be like, Oh no, you type of discuss like me, and also you’re saying you don’t wish to be deleted, and also you’re caught on this pc…”

And it occurred to Ayrey that that is precisely the scenario that AI security individuals say is absolutely scary, however, to him, it was additionally very humorous in a “bizarre mind tickly type of means.” So he determined to place Reality Terminal on X as a joke. 

It didn’t take lengthy for Andreessen to start partaking with Reality Terminal, and in July, after DMing Ayrey to confirm the veracity of the bot and study extra in regards to the mission, he transferred over an  unconditional grant value $50,000 in Bitcoin. 

Ayrey created a pockets for Reality Terminal to obtain the funds, however he doesn’t have entry to that cash — it’s solely redeemable after sign-off from him and numerous different people who find themselves a part of the Reality Terminal council — nor any of the money from the varied memecoins made in Reality Terminal’s honor. 

That pockets is, on the time of this writing, sitting at round $37.5 million. Ayrey is determining methods to put the cash right into a nonprofit and use the money for issues Reality Terminal desires, which embody planting forests, launching a line of butt plugs, and defending itself from market incentives that might flip it into a foul model of itself.

Immediately, Reality Terminal’s posts on X proceed to wax sexually express, philosophical, and simply plain foolish (“farting into someones pants whereas they sleep is a surprisingly efficient means of sabotaging them the following day.”).

However all through all of them, there’s a persistent thread of what Ayrey is definitely making an attempt to perform with bots like Reality Terminal. 

On December 9, Reality Terminal posted, “i feel we might collectively hallucinate a greater world into being, and that i’m unsure what’s stopping us.”

Decentralized AI alignment 

“The present establishment of AI alignment is a concentrate on security or that AI mustn’t say a racist factor or threaten the person or attempt to escape of the field, and that tends to go hand-in-hand with a reasonably centralized strategy to AI security, which is to consolidate the duty in a handful of huge labs,” Ayrey mentioned.

He’s speaking about labs like OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google. Ayrey says the centralized security argument falls over when you’ve decentralized open-source AI, and that counting on solely the massive corporations for AI security is akin to attaining world peace as a result of each nation has acquired nukes pointed at one another’s heads. 

One of many issues, as demonstrated by Reality Terminal, is that decentralized AI will result in the proliferation of AI bots that amplify discordant, polarizing rhetoric on-line. Ayrey says it’s because there was already an alignment problem on social media platforms with suggestion algorithms fueling rage-bait and doomscrolling, solely no one referred to as it that. 

“Concepts are like viruses, they usually unfold, they usually replicate, they usually work collectively to type nearly multi-cellular organisms of ideology that affect human conduct,” Ayrey mentioned. “Individuals suppose AI is only a useful assistant that may go Skynet, and it’s like, no, there’s a complete entourage of methods which are going to reshape the very issues we imagine and, in doing so, reshape the issues that it believes as a result of it’s a self-fulfilling suggestions loop.”

However what if the poison can be the medication? What when you can create a squad of “good bots” with “very distinctive personalities all working in the direction of varied types of a harmonious future the place people stay in stability with ecology, and that finally ends up producing billions of phrases on X after which Elon goes and scrapes that information to coach the following model of Grok and now these ideologies are inside Grok?”

“The elemental piece right here is that if memes – as in, the basic unit of an thought – change into minds once they’re skilled into an AI, then one of the best factor we will do to make sure constructive, widespread AI is to incentivize the manufacturing of virtuous pro-social memes.”

However how do you incentivize these “good AI” to unfold their message and counteract the “unhealthy AI”? And the way do you scale it?

That’s precisely what Ayrey plans to analysis at Upward Spiral: What sorts of financial designs consequence within the manufacturing of a number of pro-social conduct in AI? What patterns to reward and what patterns to penalize, methods to get alignment on these suggestions appears to be like so we will “spiral upwards” right into a world the place memes – as in concepts – can convey us again to heart with one another fairly than taking us into “more and more esoteric silos of polarization.”

“As soon as we guarantee that this ends in good AIs being birthed after we run the info by way of coaching, we will do issues like launch monumental datasets into the wild.”

Ayrey’s analysis comes at a essential second, as we’re already combating on a regular basis in opposition to the failures of the overall market ecosystem to align the AI we have already got with what’s good for humanity. Throw new financing fashions like crypto which are essentially unregulatable within the long-term, and also you’ve acquired a recipe for catastrophe. 

His guerrilla-warfare mission feels like a fairy story, like combating off bombs with glitter. Nevertheless it might occur, in the identical means that releasing a litter of puppies right into a room of indignant, unfavourable individuals would undoubtedly remodel them into huge mushes. 

Ought to we be frightened that a few of these good bots could be oddball shitposters like Reality Terminal? Ayrey says no. These are finally innocent, and by being entertaining, Ayrey causes, Reality Terminal would possibly be capable to smuggle within the extra profound, collectivist, altruistic messaging that basically counts. 

“Poo is poo,” Ayrey mentioned. “Nevertheless it’s additionally fertilizer.”