“I think the most ironic way the world could end would be if someone made a memecoin over a man’s stretched anus, creating the singularity.”
This is Andy Ayrey, the founder of the decentralized AI alignment research lab Upward Spiral, who is also behind the viral AI bot Truth Terminal. You may have heard of Truth Terminal and its weird, horny, pseudo-spiritual posts on X that caught the attention of VC Marc Andreessen, who sent him $50,000 in Bitcoin this summer. Or perhaps you’ve heard stories about the made-up religion it propagates, the Goatse Gospels, influenced by Goatse, an early Aughts shock site that Ayrey just referenced.
If you’ve heard of it, then you’re familiar with the memecoin Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT), which was created by an anonymous fan on the Solana blockchain and now has a total market value of more than $600 million. And you may have heard about the meteoric rise of Fartcoin (FRTC), one of many memecoins created by fans based on an earlier Truth Terminal brainstorming session, which has just reached a market cap of $1 billion.
While the crypto community seizes on this strange story as an example of an emerging financial market type trading on trending information, Ayrey, a New Zealand-based AI researcher, says this is the least interesting part.
For Ayrey, Truth Terminal, which is powered by an entourage of different models, most notably Metas Llama 3.1, is an example of how stable AI personas or characters can arise spontaneously and how these personas not only create the conditions for self-financing but can also spread “mimetic viruses”…
