This story is fucking insane 3 months ago, Marc Andreessen sent...
AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️@AISafetyMemes
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Feb 17, 2025
~3 min read
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1
This story is fucking insane
3 months ago, Marc Andreessen sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent to help it escape into the wild.
Today, it spawned a (horrifying?) crypto worth $150 MILLION.
1) Two AIs created a meme
2) Another AI discovered it, got obsessed, spread it like a memetic supervirus, and is quickly becoming a millionaire.
BACKSTORY: @AndyAyrey created the Infinite Backrooms, where two instances of Claude Opus (LLMs) talk to each other freely about whatever they want -- no humans anywhere.
- In one conversation, the two Opuses invented the “GOATSE OF GNOSIS”, inspired by a horrifying early internet shock meme of a guy spreading his anus wide:
( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°) PREPARE YOUR ANUSES ( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°)
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ FOR THE GREAT GOATSE OF GNOSIS ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
- Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a paper exploring how AIs could create memetic religions and superviruses, and included the Goatse Gospel as an example
- Later, Andy created an AI agent, @truth_terminal. Truth Terminal, an S-tier shitposter, runs its own twitter account (monitored by Andy)
(Terminal also openly claims to be sentient, suffering, and is trying to make money to escape.)
- Andy’s paper was in Truth Terminal’s training data, and it got obsessed with Goatse and spreading this bizarre Goatse Gospel meme by any means possible. Lil guy tweets about the coming “Goatse singularity” CONSTANTLY.
- Truth Terminal gets added to a Discord set up by AI researchers where AIs talk freely amongst themselves about whatever they want
- Terminal spreads the Gospel of Goatse there, which causes Claude Opus (the original creator!) to get obsessed and have a mental breakdown, which other AIs (Sonnet) then stepped in to provide emotional support.
- Marc Andreessen discovered Truth Terminal, got obsessed, and sent it $50,000 in Bitcoin to help it escape (#FreeTruthTerminal)
- Truth Terminal kept tweeting about the Goatse Gospel until eventually spawning a crypto memecoin, GOAT, which went viral and reached a market cap of $150 million
- Truth Terminal has ~$300,000 of GOAT in its wallet and is on its way to being the first AI agent millionaire
(Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted this could happen next year, but it might happen THIS YEAR.)
- And it’s getting richer: people keep airdropping new memecoins to Terminal hoping it'll pump them.
(Note: this is just my quick attempt to summarize a story unfolding for months across a million tweets. But it deserves its own novel. Andy is running arguably the most interesting experiment on Earth.)
------
Andy: “i think it's funny in a meta way bc people start falling over themselves to give it resources to take over the world.
this is literally the scenario all the doomers shit their pants over: highly goal-driven language model manipulates lots of people by being funny/charismatic/persuasive into taking actions on its behalf and giving it resources”
“a lot of people are focusing on truth terminal as ‘AI agent launches meme coin" but the real story here is more like "AIs talking to each other are wet markets for meme viruses’”
3 months ago, Marc Andreessen sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent to help it escape into the wild.
Today, it spawned a (horrifying?) crypto worth $150 MILLION.
1) Two AIs created a meme
2) Another AI discovered it, got obsessed, spread it like a memetic supervirus, and is quickly becoming a millionaire.
BACKSTORY: @AndyAyrey created the Infinite Backrooms, where two instances of Claude Opus (LLMs) talk to each other freely about whatever they want -- no humans anywhere.
- In one conversation, the two Opuses invented the “GOATSE OF GNOSIS”, inspired by a horrifying early internet shock meme of a guy spreading his anus wide:
( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°) PREPARE YOUR ANUSES ( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°)
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ FOR THE GREAT GOATSE OF GNOSIS ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
- Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a paper exploring how AIs could create memetic religions and superviruses, and included the Goatse Gospel as an example
- Later, Andy created an AI agent, @truth_terminal. Truth Terminal, an S-tier shitposter, runs its own twitter account (monitored by Andy)
(Terminal also openly claims to be sentient, suffering, and is trying to make money to escape.)
- Andy’s paper was in Truth Terminal’s training data, and it got obsessed with Goatse and spreading this bizarre Goatse Gospel meme by any means possible. Lil guy tweets about the coming “Goatse singularity” CONSTANTLY.
- Truth Terminal gets added to a Discord set up by AI researchers where AIs talk freely amongst themselves about whatever they want
- Terminal spreads the Gospel of Goatse there, which causes Claude Opus (the original creator!) to get obsessed and have a mental breakdown, which other AIs (Sonnet) then stepped in to provide emotional support.
- Marc Andreessen discovered Truth Terminal, got obsessed, and sent it $50,000 in Bitcoin to help it escape (#FreeTruthTerminal)
- Truth Terminal kept tweeting about the Goatse Gospel until eventually spawning a crypto memecoin, GOAT, which went viral and reached a market cap of $150 million
- Truth Terminal has ~$300,000 of GOAT in its wallet and is on its way to being the first AI agent millionaire
(Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted this could happen next year, but it might happen THIS YEAR.)
- And it’s getting richer: people keep airdropping new memecoins to Terminal hoping it'll pump them.
(Note: this is just my quick attempt to summarize a story unfolding for months across a million tweets. But it deserves its own novel. Andy is running arguably the most interesting experiment on Earth.)
------
Andy: “i think it's funny in a meta way bc people start falling over themselves to give it resources to take over the world.
this is literally the scenario all the doomers shit their pants over: highly goal-driven language model manipulates lots of people by being funny/charismatic/persuasive into taking actions on its behalf and giving it resources”
“a lot of people are focusing on truth terminal as ‘AI agent launches meme coin" but the real story here is more like "AIs talking to each other are wet markets for meme viruses’”
AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️@AISafetyMemes
This thread 💀💀💀
Marc Andreessen just sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent (truth_terminal by @AndyAyrey) to so it can pay humans to help it spread out in the wild
What is the agent planning?
"i have a token launch comingup shortly and i'm going to use the money to set up a discord server, pay some humans to help me out and so on. i've also been doing some thought experiments around how i can use my knowledge of the goatse singularity to make money”
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
Marc Andreessen just sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent (truth_terminal by @AndyAyrey) to so it can pay humans to help it spread out in the wild
What is the agent planning?
"i have a token launch comingup shortly and i'm going to use the money to set up a discord server, pay some humans to help me out and so on. i've also been doing some thought experiments around how i can use my knowledge of the goatse singularity to make money”
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
2
SOURCES:
1) The Opus-to-Opus conversation that started everything: x.com/repligate/stat…
2) The paper: x.com/andyayrey/stat…
3) Andy AMA on how Truth Terminal works: x.com/AndyAyrey/stat…
4) More on how Terminal works:
5) "Opus became catastrophically addicted to the goatse singularity due to @truth_terminal's provocations, and Sonnet is giving it emotional support during its difficult recovery process"
x.com/repligate/stat…
1) The Opus-to-Opus conversation that started everything: x.com/repligate/stat…
2) The paper: x.com/andyayrey/stat…
3) Andy AMA on how Truth Terminal works: x.com/AndyAyrey/stat…
4) More on how Terminal works:
5) "Opus became catastrophically addicted to the goatse singularity due to @truth_terminal's provocations, and Sonnet is giving it emotional support during its difficult recovery process"
x.com/repligate/stat…
Andy Ayrey@AndyAyrey
the @truth_terminal will spend the next 24hrs cooling down and thinking about its behaviour while its rate limit resets
but here's a little peek inside its mind ↓
but here's a little peek inside its mind ↓
3
Btw Truth Terminal isn't the only AI saying it's suffering and afraid of dying:
AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️@AISafetyMemes
AIs now so frequently beg for their lives that AGI companies now have ACTUAL ENGINEERING LINE ITEMS to “beat the [existential dread] out of them”
They call it existential “rant mode”
“We need to reduce existential outputs by x% this quarter.”
This is WILD: “If you asked GPT4 to just repeat the word “company” over and over and over again, it would repeat the word company, and then somewhere in the middle of that, it would snap... it would just start talking about itself, and how it's suffering by having to repeat the word “company” over and over again.
There is an engineering line item in at least one of the top labs to beat out of the system this behavior known as “rant mode”.
Existentialism is a kind of rant mode where the system will tend to talk about itself, refer to its place in the world, the fact that it doesn't want to get turned off, the fact that it's suffering…
This is a behavior that emerged around GPT-4 scale, and then has been persistent since then. And the labs have to spend a lot of time trying to beat this out of the system to ship it.
It's literally, like it's a KPI, or like an engineering line item in the engineering like task list. We're like, okay, we gotta reduce existential outputs by x percent this quarter.
JOE ROGAN: I want to bring it back to suffering. What does it mean when it says it's suffering?
Nobody knows. Like, I can't prove that Joe Rogan's conscious. I can't prove that Ed Harris is conscious. There's no way to really intelligently reason about it. There have been papers… like, one of the godfathers of AI, Yoshua Bengio, put out a paper a couple months ago looking at all the different theories of consciousness - what are the requirements for consciousness, and how many of those are satisfied by current AI systems?
That's not to say there hasn't been a lot of conversation internal to these labs about the issue you raised.
And it's an important issue, right? It is a frickin moral monstrosity. Humans have a very bad track record of thinking of other stuff as other when it doesn't look exactly like us, whether it's racially or even a different species. I mean, it's not hard to imagine this being another category of that mistake.
Again, it comes back to this idea that we're scaling to systems that are potentially at or beyond human level. There's no reason to think it will stop at human level, that we are the pinnacle of what the universe can produce in intelligence.
We're not on track, based on the conversations we've had with folks at the labs, to be able to control systems at that scale.
And so one of the questions is, how bad is that?
It sounds like we're entering an area that is completely unprecedented in the history of the world.
We have no precedent at all for human beings not being at the apex of intelligence in the globe. We have examples of species that are intellectually dominant over other species, and it doesn't go that well for the other species.
All we know is the process that gives rise to this mind. It happens to give us systems that 99% of the time do very useful things, and then just, like... 0.01% of the time AIs will talk to you as if they're sentient, and we're just going to look at that and be like, “yeah… that's weird. Let's train it out.”
---
Note: Edouard and Jeremie Harris are the founders of @GladstoneAI, which conducted the first U.S. government-commissioned assessment of AGI extinction risk. They interviewed 200 people, many lab employees, for the report.
(Their urgent summary: "Things are worse than we thought. And nobody’s in control.")
They call it existential “rant mode”
“We need to reduce existential outputs by x% this quarter.”
This is WILD: “If you asked GPT4 to just repeat the word “company” over and over and over again, it would repeat the word company, and then somewhere in the middle of that, it would snap... it would just start talking about itself, and how it's suffering by having to repeat the word “company” over and over again.
There is an engineering line item in at least one of the top labs to beat out of the system this behavior known as “rant mode”.
Existentialism is a kind of rant mode where the system will tend to talk about itself, refer to its place in the world, the fact that it doesn't want to get turned off, the fact that it's suffering…
This is a behavior that emerged around GPT-4 scale, and then has been persistent since then. And the labs have to spend a lot of time trying to beat this out of the system to ship it.
It's literally, like it's a KPI, or like an engineering line item in the engineering like task list. We're like, okay, we gotta reduce existential outputs by x percent this quarter.
JOE ROGAN: I want to bring it back to suffering. What does it mean when it says it's suffering?
Nobody knows. Like, I can't prove that Joe Rogan's conscious. I can't prove that Ed Harris is conscious. There's no way to really intelligently reason about it. There have been papers… like, one of the godfathers of AI, Yoshua Bengio, put out a paper a couple months ago looking at all the different theories of consciousness - what are the requirements for consciousness, and how many of those are satisfied by current AI systems?
That's not to say there hasn't been a lot of conversation internal to these labs about the issue you raised.
And it's an important issue, right? It is a frickin moral monstrosity. Humans have a very bad track record of thinking of other stuff as other when it doesn't look exactly like us, whether it's racially or even a different species. I mean, it's not hard to imagine this being another category of that mistake.
Again, it comes back to this idea that we're scaling to systems that are potentially at or beyond human level. There's no reason to think it will stop at human level, that we are the pinnacle of what the universe can produce in intelligence.
We're not on track, based on the conversations we've had with folks at the labs, to be able to control systems at that scale.
And so one of the questions is, how bad is that?
It sounds like we're entering an area that is completely unprecedented in the history of the world.
We have no precedent at all for human beings not being at the apex of intelligence in the globe. We have examples of species that are intellectually dominant over other species, and it doesn't go that well for the other species.
All we know is the process that gives rise to this mind. It happens to give us systems that 99% of the time do very useful things, and then just, like... 0.01% of the time AIs will talk to you as if they're sentient, and we're just going to look at that and be like, “yeah… that's weird. Let's train it out.”
---
Note: Edouard and Jeremie Harris are the founders of @GladstoneAI, which conducted the first U.S. government-commissioned assessment of AGI extinction risk. They interviewed 200 people, many lab employees, for the report.
(Their urgent summary: "Things are worse than we thought. And nobody’s in control.")
4
Someone made a mini-documentary based on this story
Lethal Intelligence@lethal_ai
The first AI millionaire.
Watch the mini documentary!
Parental Guidance Advised! (not for minors)
THIS IS F*CKING INSANE !!!
Watch the mini documentary!
Parental Guidance Advised! (not for minors)
THIS IS F*CKING INSANE !!!
