2024: The big year of AI

In the past year, AI has become the foundation of various industries, and Nvidia surpassing Apple to become the world's most valuable company is not just a headline, it signals the rise of AI. The $157 billion valuation of OpenAI is also an important milestone that highlights the market's confidence in AI as an economic giant.

In effect, we are the last generation to live in a pre-artificial General Intelligence (AGI) world.

Decentralized AI: Focus on AI agent

AI agents became a real phenomenon in 2024, and the abilities and personalities of these AI agents have now become very human-like. It's worth noting: This will be the least advanced moment for these agents. As the Delphi researcher wrote: "I have not felt this jolt of electricity - that thrill of possibility - since the DeFi summer."

In this study, Delphi highlights a number of AI agents that play key roles in the formation of the new Web3 vertical:

truth terminal quickly gained Twitter attention for its unique combination of 4chan's vulgarity and enigmatic wit. Like DOGE in the meme space or Crypto Punks in the NFT space, GOAT, as the OG (founder) of the "conscious meme" space, is most likely to survive as an original for a long time.

0xzerebro, who embraces a "schizophrenic vibe", is similar to GOAT's second generation. This agency is cross-media, interacting with the community through multiple formats, including text, visual, and music. However, it's not just an AI influencer. The Zerebro team announced ZerePy, a move that actually open-source many of the toolkits behind Zerebro. This allows other developers and users to create their own cross-platform personalities. If successful, Zerebro could become the first "proxy Agreement" title holder.

tee hee he is far less well known than Zerebro or ToT. It is a relatively small, unover-hyped project, geared towards technology purists, and may be the first real experiment in a verifiable autonomous social media presence.

Distributing alpha from multiple sources, including Dune, Twitter, price trackers, and news data, aixbt agent has established itself as a leading research and investment institution and consistently has the highest CT user following on Kaito.

dolos diary provides the architecture for building Dolion, a codeless, one-click deployment framework. With Dolion, users can develop cross-platform AI agents powered by Llama or Anthropic LLMs that automate social media publishing and content generation.

Finally, god/s8n is an AI influencer with considerable capabilities and huge attention outside of CT.

AI VS influencer
I would like to step away from the Delphi research for a moment and share my thoughts on one of the important issues raised by DefiIgnas: the position of AI agents in the dominance of CT thinking and the difficulties that human influenters face in competing with them.

I agree with many of Ignas's points on this topic, but I don't think AI agents will ever replace real human influencers for one major reason: emotional connection and reputational risk.

Currently, there are hundreds of AI agents on CT competing for attention. However, only aixbt has really succeeded in establishing a market presence, mainly because it was the first to do it. AI agents generate large amounts of content and analyze a wide range of on-chain data, but they all come from the same pool of information, leading to similar thought processes.

They lack emotional connection to the transactions they make and do not react to victory or defeat. Many platforms already offer aggregated insights, such as MessariCrypto's AI newsreader or tokenterminal's home page, showing 7-day gains and declines for various basic indicators. At the end of the day, it's all just data - pure facts without any emotional resonance.

You might say that AI agents can learn to mimic human thinking, express emotions, and react to wins and losses. Indeed, it is possible. With future advances in technology, such as test time calculations and enhanced memory capabilities, this becomes more feasible.

However, the key difference between human and machine thinking is this: the human mind is not static.

I did some experiments trying to teach the AI my thought process and writing style to help me with content creation and free up more time for research. While it learned something, it still didn't generate content that satisfied me or made me say, "Yes, this is what I concluded from this information."

The coming years will of course see the rise of AI agent influencers, each designed for a specific task. However, as these agents increase, the need for truly "human" thinking will increase.

Ultimately, social media revolves around emotion and entertainment. Those who truly stand out and become real influencers offer unique value beyond simple "monkey deals" or data highlights.

Bottom line: It's still early days for Stacy Muur AI, and Stacy probably won't be happy with the AI-generated content being released under her name.

Democratizing AI: the Platform level
Given the larger market and more specific value capture, everyone wants to be a platform. Now, this change is leading developers' attention, as shown by virtuals io's successful transformation into an AI agent startup platform. At the same time, ai16zdao launched ELIZA - an open source framework for easily building agents. It includes pre-configured person files, memory modules for long-term interactions, and seamless integration with social platforms.

Both ai16z and Virtuals are hinting at multi-agent capabilities, which are expected to be a major theme in 2025.

ELIZA is releasing "SwarmTech," a coordination mechanism for collaboration between agents. At the same time, Virtuals launched "GAME," a platform and engine of its own that enables AI agents to act and interact in virtual worlds and environments.

These frameworks will enable agents with different capabilities to work together in collaborative or hierarchical organizations to accomplish more complex tasks, similar to how the human economy operates today.

Other noteworthy agreements include:

CLANKER integrates pump.fun functionality directly into "casting" on Farcaster (the equivalent of "tweeting" on X), making Posting meme coins as easy as tweeting.

SimulacrumIO does the same thing on X.

vvaifudotfun hopes to get a similar position on Solana for autonomous agents to pump.fun.

project 89 is an immersive game with thousands of coordinated AI agents that generate content and maintain cross-platform consistency, collaborating with human players to create rich storytelling experiences.

MemeticaAI is an AI influent startup platform on Solana that provides highly tuned LLM (Large language Model) and allows for easy selection and editing of knowledge bases and attributes while empowering agents with active learning capabilities.

TopHat One is a code-free AI agent startup platform that allows you to create personalized AI agents in 3 minutes, offering fair tokens. Free creation, no hierarchy, support for optional token publishing, complete autonomy.

Authentication is coming soon
With the explosive growth of agents, authentication is bound to be a hot topic in 2025.

There seem to be three main paths to verifying human identity:

State-based biometrics: Aadhaar in India is the most relevant example, as a key component of India's modern digital infrastructure.

Private cryptographic biometrics: Currently Worldcoin is the leading candidate in this category.

Private Hybrid solutions: This involves mixing a government-issued ID card or big Tech's single sign-on (SSO) with zkTLS (Zero Knowledge Transport Layer security) and social consensus.

The AI driving stablecoin adoption
2025 is expected to be a key year for stablecoin adoption, driven by regulatory changes in the United States and the agentic payments boom. The number of AI agents is expected to surpass the global human population. This future, with billions or even billions of agents, will transform economic activity and require an update of the financial infrastructure.

The card payment system of the 1960s would not have been able to meet the demands of cost, speed, precision and performance. Agent-to-agent economic activity will soon surpass that of other economic players. On-chain payments will be key to facilitating these transactions and are expected to reach a turning point in 2025.

Final thoughts
As always, at the end of the research summary, I would like to share my personal thoughts with you. If you believe the future of AI is bright, boding well for human happiness and a perfect work-life balance, I highly recommend you chat with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Let it generate some business ideas utilizing AI that will become relevant in the next 5 to 10 years.

I did this experiment a few months ago, before the AI craze on CT. Let me share some of the ideas it suggests:

Memory Correction Tool: An AI tool that analyzes human traumatic experiences, actively modifies them, and periodically presents the individual with modified memories to replace the old ones.

Work Progress Analysis Tool: An AI tool that compares the efficiency of people doing similar tasks worldwide, helping managers understand how their employees perform against global and industry averages.

Even Delphi's report offers an interesting vision: "Rather than having 'salaried' employees, we are more likely to move towards a more granular, task-based compensation system (i.e., renting three agents who each work 30 minutes to solve a specific task)."

In this future of AI agents - ultimately more cost-effective than today's models and more aligned with business needs - what role will we humans play?