ai16z Founder Shaw: The Original Intention of the Project Is to Give Ordinary People the Opportunity to Become Investors

In order to get closer to the community, Shaw, who had been hiding behind the scenes and focusing on technology, stepped forward.

Author: Weilin, PANews

In order to get closer to the community, Shaw, who had been hiding behind the scenes and focusing on technology, stepped forward. In late December, which was the most important holiday overseas - Christmas, Shaw and his wife chose to come to China to meet with community developers. From Shanghai to Beijing and then to Hong Kong, Shaw's schedule was very tight, and he was lined up for questions at every event.

As the most popular AI agent project, ai16z's token market value has exceeded $1 billion. The core of ai16z, ElizaOS, is a powerful multi-agent simulation framework designed to create, deploy and manage autonomous AI agents. It is built with TypeScript and can interact across multiple platforms. Currently, many projects are being developed based on this highly acclaimed open source framework.

On December 26, at the ai16z community exchange event held in Beijing, PANews had an in-depth conversation with Shaw, the founder of ai16z and creator of ElizaOS, to discuss the original intention, progress and future development direction of the project, as well as his views on the future of AI Agents.

Shaw said he is not a money lover, but his development work aims to provide investment opportunities for ordinary people so that the crypto ecosystem can transform from speculative to generative, getting rid of gambling-style bets and investing in things that can truly expand the pie.

In terms of project progress, ai16z will soon announce a list of partners to improve transparency, and will announce a new proposal for ai16z token economics around January 1. Shaw believes that in order to deal with the AI hosting world, people should own their own data and models, and high decentralization is the key.

The original intention of ai16z: to give ordinary people the opportunity to become investors

In the interview, Shaw admitted that the birth of ai16z stems from his observation of the current investment landscape and his desire for fair investment opportunities. He mentioned: "If you want to invest in top startups like Uber or OpenAI, you must be an institutional investor like a16z. Ordinary people have almost no channels to access these opportunities."

Shaw believes that crypto ecosystems like Solana can move from being speculative to being generative, moving away from gambling on this token or that token, and investing in things that can actually expand the pie. Like companies and software. For example, when a16z, Paradigm or other large venture capital firms invest in software companies, they also incorporate them into their own networks and drive value. They make money because they create something extremely valuable. Shaw hopes that similar opportunities can be widely used by ordinary people and communities.

He recalled the beginnings of the project: "I worked with baoskee from daos.fun. We had lunch together, and I said, I want to make like an AI version of a16z. He said, just call it ai16z and put it together. So we started working on it immediately after lunch that day."

Latest progress: list of partners to be announced, new proposal for ai16z token economics

As ai16z's token market value exceeds $1 billion, Shaw revealed a series of exciting project dynamics. In the short term, Shaw believes that many people in the crypto field do not understand DeFi and do not understand how to use the funds in their wallets to make more profits for themselves like banks or other financial institutions. ai16z hopes to build a bridge to connect DeFi with ordinary users.

Therefore, ai16z is developing tools such as the Automatic Liquidity Pool (LP) Agent. This agent can automatically manage liquidity pools for users and help them earn income. The autonomous investor tool developed by ai16z allows the community to invest in projects they believe in. And this autonomous investor is not just determined by AI, but by the community collectively. AI listens to everyone's opinions, organizes them into an investment thesis, and then makes decisions as a representative of the community. ai16z is interested in how AI can solve many coordination and communication problems within DAOs and communities, thereby helping them make decisions together.

In addition, Shaw said that the project will officially announce the list of all partners to improve the transparency of the project and help the community more clearly understand the cooperation between the parties and their specific scope. Regarding token economics, in response to the controversy that the token economics is unclear pointed out by industry insiders, ai16z will announce a new token economics proposal around January 1. The proposal was jointly designed by professionals from multiple teams and will include LP matching mechanisms, DeFi function integration, etc. In addition, the project also revealed that they have acquired a Launchpad company, which will be used for the official release of AI agents in the future.

At the same time, the AI Pool project, which Shaw has supported many times on social media recently, has attracted market attention