36 – INB4 Memecoins Go Mainstream

AI Isn’t A Bubble. Software Is.

I’m typically either two years too early or two seconds too late. And for a hot sec, the latter seemed totrue once again this past week, as the AI sector crashed — moments after I entered it in earnest.

My capacities as a dev have continue to grow week over week as I struggle through the deployment of playhaus’ MVP to Google’s Cloud Platform. (Which I am probably still doing as we speak.) Of course, when I say “capacities as a dev”, I mean “cursing out an AI-powered coding chatbot until it gets results”, but hey. It does get results. More than all my past dev hires combined, if that tells you anything.

That’s not all. Over the weekend, I finally started a project with LangChain, a framework for developing custom AI agents and operators. I was psyched to finally start dancing at the party — up until the music unceremoniously stopped. As you’ve surely heard, China’s industrial machine responded to the erstwhile TikTok ban with DeepSeek, an open-source LLM that can apparently outperform ChatGPT and was developed in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost. Blue-chip AI stocks promptly plummeted, right as I was getting my feet wet. Sigh. Just a simple guy, trying to leverage the Solana Agent SDK, so I can build some memecoin sniper bots and buy myself a vacation.

Fortunately, the rout didn’t last long. Investors are already buying the dip today, and I can’t say I’m surprised, given the rise of the AI meta in the web3 space, the success of AI meme coins, and the 180 on SAMA’s costly AI training clusterfuck, Project Stargate. The reports of the AI bubble’s burst were greatly exaggerated.

As much as we may fall on the anti-Big-Tech side of the spectrum, I can’t argue in good faith that this is a bad thing. We should be hopeful for NVIDIA, and the future of the hardware side of these businesses, because demand for computers will scale exponentially. Our reliance on technology all but guarantees it. (At least, until we start getting into organic-based computation. But I’m sure NVIDIA has R&D in the space already.) Efficiency gains in energy consumption or processing capacity shouldn’t scare the markets.

What should scare the markets are open-source models, decentralized computation networks, and community-owned applications that transform our current internet infrastructure from digital fiefdoms to a true public utility. The software moat is bloated and over-valued in this environment. 

In other words, AI isn’t a bubble, but software is.

The short-lived fall of TikTok exposed the fallibility of even the biggest tech players. Now, imagine if the ban didn’t come from the outside, but from within. A digital asset custody protocol — encompassing the assets that represent you, your digital identity, and enabling you to choose the level of your privacy and benefit from the resale or licensing of data — could bring some of the biggest companies in the world to their knees.

AI isn’t going anywhere. But it requires that very same data to train, update, and optimize it. Cut off access to it (or, even better, make companies pay for it) and it could cripple the majority of profitable operations for software giants like Microsoft and Google.

Of course, that raises a big follow-up question: What is the killer consumer app that takes us there? And another one, in the case of this newsletter: How do we keep it from centralized control?

Our friend and advisor Branden suggests we build on the existing idea from Newglenn.eth, AI memecoins of sunset legacy brands like Enron, Blockbuster, or even PanAM but imbued with the power of pseudo-sentience, through the creation of character-based LLM. So basically, the OG Wendy’s Twitter account, but instead of an intern dragging anons, it’s an AI agent dragging web2 walled gardens all to hell.

(And potentially a community of fans voting on token weights, with their tokens, to adjust the personality of the brand character, or allowing the bot to spend its tokens to build up a new business from the brand? Okay, okay. I’ll stop boring y’all and just tell it to my AI coding bot instead. Can’t wait to see what it spits out.)

—El Prof