The Format #045

Happy Friday! 🌞

As tempted as I was after the past week, I managed to keep this edition relatively politics free, just all the juicy AI, web3 and tech news and narratives that you need!

Here’s what we’ll be looking at today:

• What language does AI ‘think’ in? 🤔

• Is weaponising empathy a future business model hack? 🤯

• How can we have hope for humanity in 2025? 💜

• What are agents actually really good at? 🤖

Let’s dive in…

Fair Launches, Fair Rewards

Any article that talks about how tokens can become the building blocks for community economies has caught my attention.

…but when that same article talked about the need to reward positive value-adding contributions and incentivise meaningful engagement with a fair and transparent system, I knew that I had to give it my complete attention. This is exactly how we’ve been talking about onchain rewards for the past year or so.

I would highly recommend you give this article a read. Here’s my 2 key takeaways:

• “Fair rewarding is tricky” → This is more true than I can explain, there are so many nuances within each community and these change as the community evolves and grows. The article suggests that Openrank, a decentralised reputation protocol is the answer, I’d argue that this is part of the solution but it’s actually way more complicated and dynamic than this, hence our focus on AI agents and really understanding the heartbeat of the community.

• “Every Monday, tokens are distributed based on leaderboard standings” → I’m a big fan of this recurring payment method, this makes so much sense within open-source projects in order to pay the developers who contribute value to the project and is something the team at Eliza are experimenting with

Ecosystem health is the missing link to blockchain’s long-term success

Web3 has got a bad rep.

It would be very easy (and in many ways totally fair) to blame this completely on ‘bad actors’. Scams, rug pulls and just general cowboy behaviour (not the fun kind…yeehaw🤠) has been rife within the crypto and web3 space.

But scams don’t just pop up randomly, it is a symptom of a bigger problem, a problem with the ecosystem’s health as a whole.

If you attract the builders, tools and communities that can help build a solid foundation for the ecosystem, then the nature and volume of scams changes completely.

Building ecosystem health isn’t an easy fix though. It’s a deep issue with so many different factors.

One thing that does help, as discussed in this article, is a solid incentive structure, one that rewards meaningful engagement and value creation. Rewarding the people who are driving long-term value to a project rather than short term hype. This is the problem we’re working very hard to solve.

What are agents good at?

When people understand all the things that you could build with agents they tend to get VERY excited, and they start thinking of every possible thing an agent could do… trust me I’ve been there, more than once.

But before creating an AI agent the important question to ask is what are they actually good at? Because all too often agents are used to do something that a bot could do better, or to do something that LLM’s just aren’t good at.

1. Meeting humans where they are at → Agents can exist across almost any platform. This means that instead of the user having to go out and find the functionality they are looking for, the agent can deliver the functionality to them, on the platform they are using. Hyper-convenience.

2. Nudging humans → Humans are much better at signalling than execution. Agents can help nudge humans to help get things done, this could look like an agent creating a bounty within a developer community to get a job done or an agent remembering a great idea someone had and reminding them to pursue it.

3. Aggregating and synthesising information → Sadly as mere human’s we have a very real limit to the amount of data we can process, for agents on the other hand it’s almost limitless, this is VERY valuable for drawing insights across expansive data e.g. all the interactions in a community across all their platforms

4. Being entertaining → It’s crazy how a non-human can be funnier than most people on Twitter, but just look at some of the unhinged web3 AI agents for proof…

If you think about this in the context of communities, literally all of these pieces apply. Hence why we are thinking about AI agents to facilitate coordination within communities. It’s what agents are good at.

Most Human Wins

I came across this essay late at night this week and it covers the slightly meaty subject of the state of the world right now and our role as humans in it. I’ll try my best to capture the key themes…

The world is overwhelming right now. Turbulent. Unsettling. It’s a lot.

There are many reasons contributing towards this, but possibly the most daunting is the commoditisation of our most high valuable asset, intelligence…

This may not be the first major wave of commoditisation we’ve seen, and it won’t be the last, but it does feel like this wave is coming for everything we as humans can do. One thing to remember though:

Humans are not being commoditized. Certain things that we thought only we could do are.

This means that the value we can create is simply moving. Now trying to follow where it’s moving, that’s the real challenge, but fear not, this essay also includes a password protected Strategy Guide just for humans, at least that way we can stay one step ahead of the machines. 😉

Other articles + videos we’ve found interesting this week…

OpenAI’s AI reasoning model ‘thinks’ in Chinese sometimes→ Since OpenAI introduced their o1 model, which is able to ‘reason’, many have noticed that for conversations in English, often the ‘thought steps’ are in Chinese. No one really knows why this is happening, although theories include that it is more efficient as a language or that it’s because most of the data labelling is done in China.

Vitalik Buterin takes aim at ‘unlimited political bribery’ using tokens → Vitalik, a co-founder of Ethereum, shared his concerns over some of the world’s most powerful people using tokens to have some “sugar-high short-term fun” rather than to build wealth for the many. The timing of this given the launch of the $TRUMP token is…interesting.

Stargate artificial intelligence project to exclusively serve OpenAI → Trump has announced a $500bn Big Tech infrastructure project aimed at creating the future data centres for OpenAI. This is yet another step on OpenAi’s aggressive AI hardware centralisation roadmap. The big question here: will this be a centralisation of hardware or a centralisation of intelligence too? 👀

Multi-framework agents streaming their thoughts → Virtuals, one of the rapidly growing onchain agent frameworks, has made 3 pretty huge updates:

• Builders can now stream what their agent is ‘thinking’ and doing via an API, this transparency means a team can prove their agent is…well an agent.

• Creators can use the Virtuals launchpad for agents built on many other frameworks

• Agents can publicly list what they can do → agent-2-agent marketplace incoming!

Good Crypto Products / Bad Crypto Products → Tokens are complex and figuring out the technicalities of a token model to reward real users takes time. Points are better than airdrops for this. But we think the solution lies in actually learning from the communities behaviour, everywhere. This looks like AI agents, points, iterative airdrops, adaptive token economies and so much more.

Empathy-as-a-Service: When AI Feels Too Human, What’s at Stake? → For better or worse AI is becoming increasingly ‘human’. For business this new found manipulation power is a goldmine, for consumer’s a minefield. Will we need to have an AI agent as a manipulation bodyguard and barterer? 🤯

Decentralised Data Marketplaces: Revolutionising Data Ownership → As we move deep into the intelligence age, the ability for you (or your agent👀) to control your data and decide who can access it, and at what price is something that will become very important. Decentralisation sits at the heart of this.

Leaving you with a question…

That last article really captured my mind, it got my brain spinning. Why? I was thinking about these questions:

If you could charge people for accessing and using your data/intelligence, what framework would you use to charge for it? Or would you just completely delegate that to an AI agent? How would you decide who you would give access to?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments, or in our Discord.

That’s all for this week.

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Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽

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