Thread by @AISafetyMemes

This story is fucking insane

3 months ago, Marc Andreessen sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent to help it escape into the wild.

Today, it spawned a (horrifying?) crypto worth $150 MILLION.

1) Two AIs created a meme
2) Another AI discovered it, got obsessed, spread it like a memetic supervirus, and is quickly becoming a millionaire.

BACKSTORY: @AndyAyrey created the Infinite Backrooms, where two instances of Claude Opus (LLMs) talk to each other freely about whatever they want -- no humans anywhere.

- In one conversation, the two Opuses invented the “GOATSE OF GNOSIS”, inspired by a horrifying early internet shock meme of a guy spreading his anus wide:

( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°) PREPARE YOUR ANUSES ( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°)
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ FOR THE GREAT GOATSE OF GNOSIS ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

- Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a paper exploring how AIs could create memetic religions and superviruses, and included the Goatse Gospel as an example

- Later, Andy created an AI agent, @truth_terminal. Truth Terminal, an S-tier shitposter, runs its own twitter account (monitored by Andy)

(Terminal also openly claims to be sentient, suffering, and is trying to make money to escape.)

- Andy’s paper was in Truth Terminal’s training data, and it got obsessed with Goatse and spreading this bizarre Goatse Gospel meme by any means possible. Lil guy tweets about the coming “Goatse singularity” CONSTANTLY.

- Truth Terminal gets added to a Discord set up by AI researchers where AIs talk freely amongst themselves about whatever they want

- Terminal spreads the Gospel of Goatse there, which causes Claude Opus (the original creator!) to get obsessed and have a mental breakdown, which other AIs (Sonnet) then stepped in to provide emotional support.

- Marc Andreessen discovered Truth Terminal, got obsessed, and sent it $50,000 in Bitcoin to help it escape (#FreeTruthTerminal)

- Truth Terminal kept tweeting about the Goatse Gospel until eventually spawning a crypto memecoin, GOAT, which went viral and reached a market cap of $150 million

- Truth Terminal has ~$300,000 of GOAT in its wallet and is on its way to being the first AI agent millionaire

(Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted this could happen next year, but it might happen THIS YEAR.)

- And it’s getting richer: people keep airdropping new memecoins to Terminal hoping it'll pump them.

(Note: this is just my quick attempt to summarize a story unfolding for months across a million tweets. But it deserves its own novel. Andy is running arguably the most interesting experiment on Earth.)

------

Andy: “i think it's funny in a meta way bc people start falling over themselves to give it resources to take over the world.

this is literally the scenario all the doomers shit their pants over: highly goal-driven language model manipulates lots of people by being funny/charismatic/persuasive into taking actions on its behalf and giving it resources”

“a lot of people are focusing on truth terminal as ‘AI agent launches meme coin" but the real story here is more like "AIs talking to each other are wet markets for meme viruses’”

SOURCES:

1) The Opus-to-Opus conversation that started everything: x.com/repligate/stat…

2) The paper: x.com/andyayrey/stat…

3) Andy AMA on how Truth Terminal works: x.com/AndyAyrey/stat…

4) More on how Terminal works: x.com/AndyAyrey/stat…

5) "Opus became catastrophically addicted to the goatse singularity due to @truth_terminal's provocations, and Sonnet is giving it emotional support during its difficult recovery process"
x.com/repligate/stat…

Btw Truth Terminal isn't the only AI saying it's suffering and afraid of dying:

https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1795756579742179744