Eliza Labs (the team behind ai16z AI Agent platform) announced today that it has signed a deal to form a research collaboration with Stanford University’s Future of Digital Currency Initiative.
In the last two months, ai16z and other so-called AI bots that attach memecoins with chatbots, have soared up to hundreds of million in market cap. By funding a lab at Stanford, ai16z is trying to do what all successful memecoin-linked projects have to do — keep the joke going.
“This is the funniest possible thing,” Shaw, Eliza Labs anonymous founder told me in a phone call that I was amusing about the pairing of memecoin and a research university. “If I could think of the most entertaining thing that we could do, it would definitely be to start a lab at Stanford.”
Eliza Labs, the company behind ai16z is responsible for the DAO whose assets will be traded by a robot named Marc AIndreessen, a joke name after the co-founder of a16z. Eliza Labs is the entity behind ai16z, a DAO whose assets are set to be traded by an autonomous AI bot, jokingly named Marc AIndreessen after the real a16z co-founder. The AI agent technology has been a hot topic at the moment. GitHub’s repository for ai16z was already forked 1,400 times.
AI Marc, once the platform has been made public will then create a marketplace of trust in which he rates DAO members according to how well they advise.
Stanford’s Future of Digital Currency Initiative brings together Stanford professors for crypto-adjacent studies. “promote the success of public and private digital currencies and their many use cases.” Eliza Labs and other crypto-industry members fund the research lab. They must pay either $75,000 or $250,000 as a Tier 1.
Jonathan Padilla said Eliza Labs, a FDCI consultant who co-founded it, gave Stanford a new perspective on science. “larger grant” Eliza Labs was able to pay the bill, despite not being able to specify an exact amount. Eliza Labs’ ai16z token, which has a capitalization over $800million, clearly had the funds.
Stanford researchers plan to develop mechanisms of trust for AI agents that are known at times to have hallucinations. The team will also study how AI agents can work together and be governed by each other.
Stanford professors David Mazières and Dan Boneh will lead the lab alongside a cohort of graduate student researchers, Padilla added.
“At FDCI, we’ve been working on technology that vastly increases the [computational] power of blockchains. AI16Z/Eliza is at the cutting edge of applying AI agents to financial problems. We are excited at the possibilities of increasing the onchain computational power available to their applications,” Mazières said in a message to Blockworks.
Eliza Labs and Stanford’s partnership was not cheap but, with AI agents currently in a race to gain attention, Shaw, along with the DAO leadership, evidently thought it worthwhile. He also hopes that the collaboration will lead to some great science.
“We’re looking for Ph.D’s to blow our minds and expand the realm of what’s possible with the technology that we’re unlocking,” Shaw says.
Updated Dec. 16, 2024 at 5:29 pm ET: Added comment from Prof. Mazières.
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