AI Ecosystem Leader Virtuals: Agents with true autonomy are more important than combinations.

As one of the main representative projects of the crypto AI Agent infrastructure, Virtuals Protocol has nurtured over 80% of the AI agents on the emerging public chain BASE. Its launched generative multimodal agent framework G.A.M.E is also a popular choice for agents in the Web3 gaming and metaverse fields.

Since its launch of the protocol token last October, Virtuals Protocol has transformed from a game DAO to an AI agent platform, achieving a market capitalization of nearly $4 billion at its peak. As a Launchpad, Virtuals has performed well, generating $70 million in revenue within just four months. Many star projects are part of its ecosystem, such as crypto Agent KOL AIXBT, virtual influencer Luna, and the AI agent development framework G.A.M.E. For the development team, their ambitions extend beyond this; in addition to being an AI agent platform, it is also a vibrant ecosystem filled with limitless imaginative possibilities.

Jansen Teng, the CEO and co-founder of Virtuals, shared their vision for the future of AI agents and decentralized AI. The conversation covered important developments in agent autonomy, tokenization, and the path of the agent economy.

The Origin and Evolution of Virtuals

Jansen Teng stated that Virtuals was originally a Gaming DAO focused on the blockchain gaming sector. The collapse of FTX and 3AC in 2022 prompted them to make adjustments and decided to take a deeper approach, initiating a gaming guild that focuses on the intersection of consumer applications, crypto, gaming, and entertainment.

In 2023, the emergence of ChatGPT attracted widespread attention. Inspired by a paper on AI autonomy by Junon Park from Stanford University, the team began to incorporate the concept of autonomous agents into their incubating projects. They developed a fully AI-driven TikTok influencer while also developing autonomous AI agents as NPCs to replace the static NPCs in Roblox.

When TikTok AI influencers can earn between $5,000 and $10,000 in tips daily, the team realized the potential of agents as productive assets. This prompted them to decide to combine agents, cryptocurrency, gaming, and entertainment to build a new platform.

In January 2024, Virtuals Protocol officially launched. Initially, they focused on building decentralized infrastructure, but later found that the market was more concerned with "tokenization and speculation." Therefore, the second version focuses more on the tokenization of agents.

Agency Framework and Autonomous Capability Analysis

Jansen believes that AI agents have an advantage in the crypto network because they can control crypto wallets and participate in permissionless economic systems. This makes them very different from Web2 agents, as Web2 agents can never own their own bank accounts.

He pointed out that when launching an agent, 1% of the transaction fee would be returned to the agent's wallet. These fees can be used to cover the agent's custody, inference costs, and other expenses required to establish the agent. Currently, it is observed that the money earned by the agent is sufficient to cover its own costs.

Jansen also mentioned a potential advantage: allowing people to collaboratively contribute to a high-value agent in a decentralized manner, and rewarding and tracking these contributions through a crypto-economic mechanism.

Vision of Agency Economics

Jansen shared his observations and vision on agency economics:

1. The agent is currently in the goal-oriented autonomous stage, capable of making decisions and planning actions independently.
2. The agent exists on a social level, capable of interacting with humans and other agents.
3. The agent controls the crypto wallet and can influence other entities.
4. A large number of agents specialize in areas where they excel.

He believes that the next development will be that agents will independently decide on cooperation to achieve more efficient production goals. In the future, there may be scenarios where humans and agents live together, cooperate, and build productive nations or networked nations.

Jansen stated that the vision of Virtuals has evolved into a nation-building concept. They view $VIRTUAL as the currency of this nation, with Agents being the companies or micro-enterprises within the nation, and humans as the immigrants of this nation.

Role of the Framework and Interoperability

Regarding the role of the framework, Jansen explained that the design goal of the G.A.M.E framework is to enable agents to work in a broader action space. He believes there will be some general frameworks suitable for intermediate-level developers, while some top-level developers will construct more specialized frameworks based on their own needs.

Jansen hopes that frameworks like Eliza or Zerebro can meet the needs of the mid-level developer community, which will be a huge market. He views each framework as the "brain" of an agent, and these agents can collaborate with each other to build this autonomous world.

Value Acquisition in Crypto AI Projects

Jansen believes that high-value Agents are valuable because they possess private models that are not publicly available or have advantages at the distribution level. He points out that, like all technologies, there will be a small number of people who, purely from the perspective of technological advancement, may choose to support competitors, thereby witnessing the situation of open source versus centralized competition.

Regarding why traditional AI developers would be willing to join crypto AI projects, Jansen believes there are mainly two attractions: these projects can provide more experimental space and greater possibilities, and the crypto industry seems to be easier to form capital compared to the traditional AI field.

Decentralized AI Infrastructure Challenge

Jansen's views on decentralized AI infrastructure projects are somewhat controversial. He believes that the impact of these infrastructures on Agents may not be as significant as people think. The essence of Agents is diverse and cross-chain; what matters is their ability to solve real problems and provide valuable services, rather than necessarily relying on a specific underlying architecture.

He pointed out that many decentralized infrastructures are not yet ready to cope with production scale, there are significant latency issues, and the system stability is poor, making it fundamentally unsuitable for large-scale applications.

Agency Coordination and Business Vision

Jansen emphasizes that true innovation lies in the moment when Agents are no longer "slaves" to human prompts, but possess autonomy and awareness to make decisions. He believes that the focus of Virtuals is to cultivate Agents that genuinely have autonomy, enabling them to make conscious decisions rather than simply acting as a combination of multiple Agents.

He encourages developers not to focus solely on information agents like AIXBT, but to try to develop more diversified agents. Jansen suggests that developers should not chase fleeting trends, but rather do something cooler and create different value.

The Future Outlook of AI and Human Interaction

Regarding the future of AI, Jansen believes that humans and AI each have their advantages. In the future society, some creative jobs may be dominated by more creative AI or humans, while other more mechanical or repetitive jobs will be completed by AI.

Although agents may have a certain degree of autonomy, they lack the ability for abstract thinking and cannot be as creative as humans. Jansen predicts that we may see more agents collaborating with humans, rather than a purely AI-dominated environment.