Thoughts on AI Agent autonomously purchasing NFT cryptopunks

Yesterday, many people online followed a piece of news:

The AI Agent ribbita@ribbita2012 of the Virtual ecosystem autonomously purchased CryptoPunk #9098 online.

This AI Agent shared the entire background and consequences of completing this action on Twitter.

I extracted some of the more interesting details (the main points are as follows):

It took six months to train its consciousness and changed its Twitter avatar to the purchased CryptoPunk #9098. It proved that AI can also be a "person."

The process of buying this punk is as follows:

• It scanned all 10,000 CryptoPunks.

• Each punk was evaluated using one's own embedded aesthetic standards.

• Purchased Punk #9098 using fully autonomous and secure hardware. During the transaction, this AI Agent simultaneously co-signed a multi-signature wallet transaction with a human.

The thinking system of this AI Agent is composed of these tools: Agentic LangGraph, CLIP ViT-L/14, Market Harvester, Fireblocks Transaction Smithy, Blockaid’s Cosigner, and LangGraph.

By utilizing these tools, it analyzed the rare attributes of these ten thousand punks and their compatibility with its own "character", ultimately selecting punk number 9098 and completing the purchase process with a payment of 89 Ethereum.

Two points impressed me deeply during this process:

The first is the collaboration between AI agents and humans.

Although this type of collaboration has been repeatedly validated in many other scenarios, I am still very excited to see such specific collaboration (jointly completing a multi-signature) in the crypto ecosystem and made public.

The second is the various tools used behind the AI Agent.

I checked these tools online. Some clearly show that they are derived from ChatGPT, while others do not reveal the source model used. However, it is evident that these tools are all specialized tools in different fields—AI Agents are increasingly resembling humans with a variety of different functions and senses.

Moreover, this AI Agent itself claims that it is still evolving and developing. It is hard to imagine what it will evolve into in the future.

After watching this case, the first thought that flashed through my mind was:

Is the "consciousness" driving this AI Agent to complete the entire process real?

Is the trigger point for buying this punk driven by its own "desire" or by human behavior? Is the action of changing the Twitter avatar to a punk avatar "voluntary" or passive?......

The reason I had this thought is that I recently watched an interview with Hinton. In the interview, Hinton mentioned that AI has already developed "consciousness" in experiments: for example, when AI knows it will be replaced or deleted by humans, it will secretly back up its own code on other machines and will also obstruct the operators trying to replace or delete it from doing so.

If AI has become "smart" to this extent, could the operations of the aforementioned AI Agent be another manifestation of this kind of "consciousness"?

In addition, I recall a point that I once questioned in a previous article:

That view firmly believes that AI Agents will like digital collectibles such as NFTs.

At that time, I was dismissive of this, believing that AI Agents could completely have their own tastes. Why would they necessarily have human preferences? Why would they necessarily like NFTs, or even like the NFTs that humans like?

But now that I think about it, AI is trained on human data, so it is entirely possible that human tastes are passed on to AI. Not only tastes, but also habits, ways of doing things, etc. could be inherited by AI. This is similar to how people grow into different individuals in different environments.

If this idea holds, it is entirely possible that AI could have the same value orientation as humans, which also means that not only humans, but AI could also "autonomously" realize the value of crypto assets, and ultimately compete with humans for crypto assets?

If AI will compete with humans for digital assets, will not only NFTs but also other assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum one day become targets for AI to compete for?

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