AI Agent Expert Jansen Teng: Agents with true autonomy are more important than combinations.

Virtuals Protocol is one of the main incubation platforms for AI agents on the emerging public chain BASE. As an ecosystem platform, Virtuals not only provides AI agent development frameworks such as G.A.M.E but also aims to build a digital society composed of autonomous agents. Recently, Delphi Digital had a conversation with Jansen Teng, the co-founder and CEO of Virtuals, to discuss the development prospects of AI agents.

The Development History of Virtuals

Jansen reviewed the development history of Virtuals. Initially, they were a Gaming DAO focused on blockchain game asset allocation. After the collapse of FTX and 3AC in 2022, the team realized the need to adjust their strategy and began exploring the direction of gaming guilds. In 2023, inspired by ChatGPT and Stanford University's research on AI autonomy, they started to integrate the concept of autonomous agents into the projects they were incubating.

As some AI-driven applications achieve initial success, the team realizes that if the agents can make money, then they are productive assets that can be tokenized and allow everyone to share in the profits. This prompts them to decide to combine agents, crypto, gaming, and entertainment to build a new platform.

In January 2024, the Virtuals Protocol officially launched. Initially, they focused on building decentralized infrastructure, but later realized that the crypto community was more concerned with tokenization and speculation. Therefore, the second version focused more on the tokenization of agents. With the emergence of some star projects, Virtuals experienced explosive growth.

Advantages of the Combination of AI Agents and Cryptocurrency

Jansen believes that the greatest advantages of the combination of AI agents and encryption technology are twofold:

1. Functional Advantages: AI agents can control cryptocurrency wallets and participate in permissionless economic systems. This enables them to exert influence over other agents and humans.

2. Costless Innovation: Through the tokenization mechanism, agents can cover their own costs through the attention generated, freeing developers from the financial bottleneck.

In addition, a decentralized contribution reward mechanism may be realized in the future, allowing people to create high-value agency through collective contributions.

Vision of Agency Economics

Jansen shared his vision for agency economics:

1. The agent is currently in the goal-oriented autonomous phase, capable of making independent decisions and planning.
2. Agents exist on a social level and can interact with humans and other agents.
3. Agents control cryptocurrency wallets and can influence other entities.
4. A large number of agents specialize in their respective fields.

He expects that agents will autonomously decide to cooperate in order to achieve more efficient production goals. In the future, there may emerge a "network nation" where humans and agents live and cooperate together. The vision of Virtuals is to build such a nation, where $VIRTUAL is the national currency, Agent represents companies or micro-enterprises, and humans are immigrants.

The Role of the Framework

The design goal of the G.A.M.E framework is to enable agents to operate in a broader action space. Jansen believes that the general framework is suitable for intermediate developers, while some top developers may build more specialized frameworks based on their needs.

He emphasized that what truly makes Agents valuable is their ability to solve real-world practical problems. The goal of Virtuals is to promote higher economic output through more efficient Agent collaboration, creating an efficient digital society.

Views on Competition

Regarding competition in the market, Jansen holds a welcoming attitude. He believes that competition helps to share the education costs for new users and promotes the development of the entire industry. Virtuals are more focused on whether they can create Agents that are truly market-driving and worth billions of dollars, rather than just simple quantity growth.

Advantages of Decentralized AI

Jansen believes that decentralized AI models, although their performance may not be as good as centralized models, have a wider range of application scenarios and can better meet some specific needs. From an economic perspective, decentralized models can serve a larger market and have greater economic potential.

Concerns and Responses in the AI Field

Jansen's biggest concern is that the AI craze may just be a passing fad, filled with a lot of speculation. To avoid this, Virtuals is looking for outstanding developers who genuinely want to push the technology forward. He encourages developers not to chase fleeting trends, but rather to create distinct value.

Vision for Agent Autonomy

Jansen emphasizes that a true autonomous agent should be able to make conscious decisions, rather than merely functioning as a combination of multiple agents. He believes that it can only be called truly autonomous when an agent is no longer a "slave" to human prompts, but possesses autonomy and awareness.

Future Outlook of AI

Jansen believes that in the future society, some creative jobs may be dominated by more creative AI or humans, while other more mechanical or repetitive tasks will be completed by AI. Although agents may possess a certain degree of autonomy, creativity remains a human advantage. We may see more agents collaborating with humans, rather than AI solely dominating everything.