The Format #044
AI agents with BIG dreams, penguins on a rollercoaster and how hair loss is escaping the valley of death...
Happy Friday! 🌞
It’s the first Format friday in 2025, and it’s already shaping up to be a crazy year!!
Here’s what we’ll be looking at today:
The token that will fix your hair loss 😍
Do AI Agents daydream of electric sheep? 🐑
Why the date we hit AGI seems to change every single day! ⏰
How to accelerate progress the right way 🌟
Let’s dive in…
Eliza Daydreams
You may have heard us mention AI agents once or twice recently… well we’ve been doing a lot of experiments and created a lot of very cool stuff. For now though, there are still some pretty major limitations in what an agent can do.
Most of these limitations come from the fact that most current agent frameworks, including the Eliza framework we have been using, are somewhat reactive. They require either natural language inputs or external triggers and schedules to complete actions. They struggle with time-horizon goals.
You can get them to order a Domino’s pizza via a Linkedin message, build up a Twitter following by posting every 4-6 hours or even make transactions onchain.
But if you gave an agent a large goal and just let it wild… now that’s a different story. This is where “Daydreams” come into play.
The idea is that by creating a ‘hierarchal task network’ with long term, mid term and short term goals, the agents will be able to iterate continuosly (using the tools that they have access to) towards much broader and more abstract goals.
This will unlock much more emergent agents that are capable of dynamic problem solving. We are seeing glimpses of this with agents like Zerebro, who released an album on Spotify.
Another exciting part of this problem is that these agents will be able to share their successes with other agents to reduce duplication and encourage collaborative learning, we’re nearing an age of true additive innovation. Wild.
Do androids dream about electric sheep? Not yet, but soon AI agents may be daydreaming about them.
DeSci's Big Dreams
BIO Protocol, which you can think of as a kind of decentralised accelerator programme or incubator specifically for the BioTech industry, have just launched their token.
It’s essentially a platform that helps to support and incubate DAO’s by helping them tackle 3 major problems that currently exist in the Biotech and wider science space:
Helping early-stage projects escape the “valley of death,” where insufficient funding often prevents promising ideas from maturing into real-world applications.
Combatting the siloing of data and intellectual property by tokenizing research outputs, promoting open access and transparent collaboration.
Replacing opaque R&D pipelines with real-time, onchain tracking of capital flows and milestones.
They are currently supporting 8 BioDAO’s focusing on everything from hair loss and psychedelic research to cryopreservation and neurodegeneration.
One interesting thing about their BIO token is that it gives holders the ability to influence all of these other BioDAO’s, with the theory that this meta-governance will help improve coordination.
Is this the first step in reshaping R&D and improving funding efficiency? 👀
Decentralised, Democratic and Defensive Accelerationism
A year ago Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) coined the concept of decentralised and democratic, differential defensive acceleration or d/acc.
The goal?
Accelerate technology, but differentially focus on technologies that improve our ability to defend, rather than our ability to cause harm, and in technologies that distribute power rather than concentrating it in the hands of a singular elite that decides what is true, false, good or evil on behalf of everyone.
This concept feels more crucial than ever, as a handful of companies have a tight grip on the hardware and foundational AI models that will power the exponential acceleration in innovation we are about to witness.
Thankfully Vitalik’s essay provides some practical strategies and frameworks on how to build specific things, across a range of domains, that help make the world safer and better in this ever accelerationist world.
Upcoming Trends in Q1 for the Agent Meta
The AI agent x blockchain space went a bit crazy in Q4 of 2024, in this digest YB, someone who we have shared many times before, shares their view on the next few months in the space.
Here’s my key takeaways:
There is going to be a huge opportunity for agentic community management where agents encourage community participation by offering bounties, creating proposals and rewarding fans for engaging in meaningful ways. 👀
Some time in the not so distant future instead of raising money via the traditional fundraising channels, teams will just need to fund their AI cloud compute, agents will then do most of the building (and marketing). 🤯
People really care about the verifiability of agents, and whether they are able to operate and make transactions onchain without needing their (human) parents to look after them. Being able to prove that actions are actually being done directly by an agent is therefore important… proof of sentience? 🤖
The excitement around AI agents may have reached a local high, but that usually means the real utility will be coming soon. 💪
Other articles + videos we’ve found interesting this week…
Machines of Loving Grace - This essay by the founder of Anthropic dives into the very practical ways that AI could transform the world for the better across many fields including Biology, Neuroscience, Poverty, Peace, Governance and Meaning. After reading 100’s of articles arguing for a hazy utopian or doomer future, this piece, heavily grounded in reality, was very refreshing (and LONG…).
OpenAI Backtracks, Gunning for Superintelligence: Altman Brings His AGI Timeline Closer - '25 to '29 - Keeping up with AI announcements is almost as hard as keeping up with the ever changing timeline towards ‘AGI’ and ‘Superintelligence’. It doesn’t help that many of the companies who define these terms, including OpenAI and Microsoft, have complex economic incentives around reaching AGI.
Some Novels I've Read Recently about the AI x Human Experience - The relationship between sci-fi and the future has always been two-way and many times has resulted in clear cases of hyperstition (self-fulfilling prophecies). Obviously it’s important to take these futures that are written for entertainment with a pinch of salt, but still, there is a lot to learn from fiction.
The Onchain Amusement Park- Pudgy Penguins is one of the few NFT projects that continues to thrive, largely due to its evolution into the first “onchain amusement park.” This piece explores how Pudgy Penguins has built a self-sustaining and fan-powered ecosystem—complete with its own distribution engine, tooling, and digital economy—one with enough attention to attract other brands to set up rides at the “Pudgy Park”.
Farcaster in 2024 - This has been the year that Farcaster has expanded from being a very niche crypto-native social network, to a programmable social layer with a promising economic ecosystem → the ‘Farconomy’. One particularly interesting trend has been the need for onchain social reputation systems, that’s something we’ve been thinking about those quite a bit too… 👀
Music Tech Ownership Ouroboros - Water and Music have created a relationship map of power dynamics within the music industry. It’s fascinating. My key takeaway: as the market share for independent artists climbs, major record labels are fighting for control by acquiring the underlying indie infrastructure.
With this in mind, it feels more important than ever to have open-source infrastructure powering artist-owned communities and economies, this is exactly why we’re so excited to be working with Amplify to create this future.
Leaving you with a question…
This week is quite an existential one, something I have been thinking about quite a lot this week. Please leave your thoughts in the comments, or in our Discord.
If you could build an AI agent and have it working 24/7 towards achieving a specific long-term goal, what would the goal be? And how much would you be willing to pay for the compute to make that happen?
That’s all for this week.
If you want more news from us, you can also sign up to our builders newsletter/ community via our website!
Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
Join our community
Join our Telegram group, The Format, for relevant news and conversations.
Check out our NEW and updated website (feedback much appreciated!!)
Join our Discord to get all the real-time updates on what is being built with Open Format
Subscribe to our YouTube → we are currently running a build series where we are streaming the whole process as we build our new product in public
Image generated by Dall-E 2 using the prompt: “A beautifully designed electric sheep with sleek metallic features and glowing fiber-optic wool is riding a rollercoaster. The sheep exudes a sense of loving grace, its eyes illuminated with warmth and joy as it glides through the air. The rollercoaster is surrounded by a soft, ethereal glow, emphasizing a feeling of serenity and wonder. The futuristic theme park in the background is filled with vibrant neon lights, but the overall mood is gentle, dreamlike, and filled with a sense of peaceful delight.”