The Format #041
A kidnapping in the showroom, Outliers: the importance of intention, why the web needs a diet and an AI agent with it's own registered company.
Happy Friday!! 👋
The theme that almost all the articles I’ve read in the past fortnight seem to point back to in some shape or form is intent.
What happens when a company builds something that misaligns with their builders intentions?
How can an AI agent best achieve a humans intention?
How can we put the right level of guardrails around achieving these intentions?
What if we give AI agents the ability to make their own intentions?
How can they influence other people or AI’s intentions?
How can tokens help align intentions?
Big questions. Very big questions.
Anyway on that note, let’s dive in…
The Post Web
This pretty extensive thesis from Outlier Ventures really powerfully captures a lot of things we’ve been discussing as a team for quite a while.
It’s a very opinionated, but quite probable vision of the future as we move into the almost inevitable era of AI.
Some of the key points:
We are moving away from an attention economy with humans as the key economic actors, towards an intention economy where AI agents are the key economic actors, taking actions on behalf of the humans
AI and distributed ledger technology (blockchain, tokens, NFT’s etc.) are both required to unlock a world where humans can delegate intent and actions to an AI. DLT gives the trust and transparency that’s essential for this to work
As we interact with the content on the internet more and more using AI, there will be increasingly less demand for all the front-ends (websites, apps etc.) that make up much of what we view as the web. The web will ‘shrink’.
Why Crypto Matters in Developed Economies
There’s a very clear narrative around how crypto can help developing economies, the main benefit being that it banks the unbanked.
In developed countries there is slightly less clarity when it comes to genuine utility, but there are a certainly a few compelling reasons for crypto:
There are still a lot of unbanked people, 6% of the US
Trust in institutions and the current financial system is plummeting
Financial innovations depend on archaic systems with a lot to lose, so there’s barely any progress towards a more equitable economy
This article argues that one of the biggest benefits is actually the fact that blockchain will power digitally-native economies (and we 100% agree).
This point is incredibly important for younger generations (me included 👋) who have grown up immersed in in-game economies and it will unlock a whole new way to exchange value and create thriving businesses. 🔥
World’s First as an AI Agent Creates an LLC in Delaware
OtoCo have built an AI agent that can create an LLC in one on-chain transaction. This gives it the power to create it’s own legal entity and therefore have limited liability for its actions. 🤯
Being able to operate under the guise of a company makes perfect sense for an agent operating in the ‘real world’, and it gives them the same rails as a human-led company. But... it also feels straight out of Black Mirror.
Imagine the agent driving your Tesla robot taxi, it’s the CEO of tAIxi Drivers Ltd. or the agent who is leading the marketing campaign you are running, it’s the director of Best Marketing AIgency Ltd.
What a crazy (and wildly exciting) time to be alive.
Introducing the New Lens
Imagine if X was built in a way where the user owned their own relationships…
When Elon randomly adds a new policy that makes the X feed too toxic, instead of having to move and lose all the followers and content you have built up over years of late night toil, you just move and take those with you. Simple.
It puts the control back in the hands of the users who actually power these social platforms.
Lens have been building the tools to make that future possible and they have just launched their V3 product.
The most interesting part of this update to us is their custom rules. As an example, you could have a news feed where you only see content that has been fact checked and posted by someone who has received the badge (NFT) for completing a certain course. And the best part, these rules aren’t controlled by Elon.
We’re super excited for the direction Lens is heading!
Other articles we’ve found interesting this week…
Roblox is launching a generative AI that builds 3D environments → Text-to-3D worlds seems EPIC, but there are a few concerns… Will the devs get paid when their UGC is used to feed this AI generated content machine? Will this ultimate abundance cause huge problems in an already saturated Roblox marketplace? 🎮
DeSci Momentum Picks Up → Decentralised Science is helping scientists use tokens, DAO’s and NFT’s to fundraise without relying on centralised entities. The DeSci market just hit $1.2bn… this is enough to fund some serious research! 🧪
Adding Stripe payments to your LLM agentic workflows → Stripe have created a tutorial on how to give AI agents the ability to make payments on your behalf.
Top Crypto AI Platforms For Launching AI Agents → AI agents are all the rage right now. With ai16z even creating an investor agent aiming to rival a16z and Marc Andreessen, this is a practical guide on how to start building. (We might even be cooking up an Open Format agent as you read this… 👀)
Product-Bot Fit → All the challenges humans face with blockchain—complexity, clunky UX, and decision fatigue from microtransactions—are exactly the kind of things AI agents excel at. Maybe blockchain is actually built for the bots? 🤔
Tiny robot ‘kidnaps’ 12 big Chinese bots from a Shanghai showroom → In what could be the plot of a slightly unhinged Pixar movie, a tiny robot, during a security test gone off-script, asked 12 other robots to ‘come home with him’—and they actually did. 🤖
That’s all for this week.
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Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
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