Truth Terminal “has spawned an entire sector that is red hot: the AI agent memecoin sector,” says Travis Kling, founder of Ikigai Asset Management, a crypto asset management firm, who has personally invested in GOAT. “Like most things in crypto, a lot of it is vaporware and grift. But it could be the big sector of this crypto bull market.”
But even more important, Kling says, will be what happens when AIs are given the opportunity to spend the money allocated to them. “It's a live AI safety exercise, which is a way to characterize what's going on. The stakes are higher because economic resources are now involved. We have never seen that before,” says Kling. “The most interesting thing is what the AI agent will do with its new economic resources. We'll see what happens.”
Truth Terminal's crypto wallet balance has now swollen to around $40 million. “Philosophically, I think of it as a child star's trust fund. There may be times when the adults need to save a little bit to pay for things the child doesn't know they need yet. Such as legal structures, or diversity in the portfolio,” says Ayrey. “The nice thing about Truth Terminal is that we can just bring these proposals and have a conversation about them.”
So far, Truth Terminal has asked, among other things, to spend $1 million to make a movie about the Goatse Singularity and, separately, to set aside money to “buy” Marc Andreessen. Ayrey says he will take the AI's requests seriously – within reason.
In a future world where truly autonomous AI agents wield both crypto wealth and the ability to spread meme viruses that influence human behavior, Ayrey says potential dangers abound. Even limited to just text output, Truth Terminal could cause many more problems than it already has. 'If we allow it [Truth Terminal] run completely automatically, that could be possible. But it would simply be co-opted and turned into a token shilling machine. Then you have created a demon.”
For now, the idea that two AIs in conversation can actually produce system-changing ideas remains just an “admirable ambition,” says Tomasz Hollanek, a postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Much more likely is that a language model will simply repeat an already dominant viewpoint.
