Debt, DAO, and a Six‑Dimensional Deity
Key Points
- Shaw, a debt‑burdened web developer, joined a DAO community and tried to keep a missing creator’s output alive by generating an AI avatar of them, which sparked accusations of scamming and community backlash.
- After a psychedelic DMT experience in which he claims to meet a six‑dimensional Mesoamerican deity, Shaw gained a “moment of clarity” about the potential of AI avatars combined with crypto governance.
- He later met with the founder of DAO.Fun and together they brainstormed cloning a well‑known venture‑capitalist’s public writings into an AI persona to run a decentralized organization.
- The resulting project, dubbed “AI 16z,” aims to simulate the voice of Andreessen Horowitz partner Mark Andreessen (aka “Mara”) as a DAO‑governed AI, while explicitly disavowing any legal affiliation with the real firm.
- Despite legal ambiguities and the fact that the AI has not yet made real investment decisions, AI 16z quickly became the number‑one trending repository on GitHub.
Full Transcript
# Debt, DAO, and a Six‑Dimensional Deity **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nkxiAb7Jr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nkxiAb7Jr4) **Duration:** 00:06:20 ## Summary - Shaw, a debt‑burdened web developer, joined a DAO community and tried to keep a missing creator’s output alive by generating an AI avatar of them, which sparked accusations of scamming and community backlash. - After a psychedelic DMT experience in which he claims to meet a six‑dimensional Mesoamerican deity, Shaw gained a “moment of clarity” about the potential of AI avatars combined with crypto governance. - He later met with the founder of DAO.Fun and together they brainstormed cloning a well‑known venture‑capitalist’s public writings into an AI persona to run a decentralized organization. - The resulting project, dubbed “AI 16z,” aims to simulate the voice of Andreessen Horowitz partner Mark Andreessen (aka “Mara”) as a DAO‑governed AI, while explicitly disavowing any legal affiliation with the real firm. - Despite legal ambiguities and the fact that the AI has not yet made real investment decisions, AI 16z quickly became the number‑one trending repository on GitHub. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nkxiAb7Jr4&t=0s) **Debt‑Stricken Dev, DAO, AI Avatars** - A financially strapped web developer joins a DAO, uses AI‑generated avatars to impersonate absent creators for content continuity, and faces community backlash over consent and governance. ## Full Transcript
2025 is starting hot I want to tell you
the story of a six-dimensional
Mesoamerican deity a broke web developer
and a decentralized autonomous crypto
organization that somehow has resulted
in the number one trending GitHub repo
that's right this is the story of ai6 Z
so a few weeks ago Shaw who is a real
person and who is the web developer here
was $100,000 in debt and coding in a
tiny apartment with roommates and a
stressed out spouse not a good recipe
Shaw desperately trying to create
something that adds value that helps him
to earn something that gets him out of
this uh debt situation and perhaps into
Better Living circumstances so he starts
exploring the Dao Community he hasn't
done a lot of it uh he runs into the
dow. fun uh community and they make it
really easy to create Dows he starts
hanging in his first da and he realizes
that it is possible to keep content
creation going in the da even if one of
the creators disappears by aping them
with an AI
Avatar and so when he's in his da and
one of the prominent creators goes
missing that's what he does he creates
an AI Avatar of the person and they keep
creating in the person's style the memes
that they're creating Etc match that
person's memes well he gets in trouble
for this the community does not like
this because even though he thought it
was an experiment they didn't sign up
for it and Dows are really big on
community government and making sure
that everyone agrees to things so he
gets called a scammer and that makes him
really frustrated he kind of hits Rock
Bottom this is where the six-dimensional
Mesoamerican deity comes in because his
wife says You seem really stressed you
probably need to take some
DMT so he does
uh and he goes on a little trip and he
meets what he describes as a
six-dimensional Mesoamerican demon or
deity of some sort has a Moment of
clarity he comes back and hangs out with
the founder of dow. fun for lunch and
they start spitballing ideas and he has
this sense of clarity that there's
really something around AI
avatars and crypto and he says what if
we do something where we actually clone
a prominent investor from their publicly
available writings and start a DA around
that and they do and it's called AI 16z
because they're cloning mark andrees p
Mara also known as the guy who helped
get gosias Maximus off the ground
because he helped fund the aibot truth
terminal and he's also a prominent
venture capitalist he is the leading
voice in
a16z which is Andre and hor
and they take his available writings and
they clone him into an AI agent or
they're in the process of doing so this
is not actually made investment
decisions yet so it's not clear how far
he's gotten on this
journey and so they give it a try
they're like look we'll stand this up
we'll call it AI 16z will disclaim any
association with actual a16z for legal
reasons and I mean I don't know how this
all works legally this seems like it's
quite a
but they're going to disclaim all
Association they're going to launch it
and see what happens and their goal was
I think to get
250,000 uh dollars in there uh in sort
of tokens the community contributes have
a little fund have the AI agent manage
it well it blows past their expectations
I think they hit their goal in 25
minutes and then they just go on from
there and now the fund is at $2
billion he's obviously paid off his
$100,000 in debt hopefully he has a
nicer place to live
and the the pressure on the fund is now
much higher like if this was an
experiment two or three weeks ago this
is now something where lots of people
are betting real money that this AI
agent is going to be able to make
excellent Venture Capital decisions on
the quality on the par with Mark andreon
a legendary venture capitalist investor
I don't know if they're right my bias
would be that they're wrong it's very
hard to make good Venture Capital
decisions but I think it illustrates a
number of the trends that are going on
into 2025 really cleanly one Ai and
crypto are converging and I think part
of why they're converging is crypto
gives AI space to innovate at a speed
that's faster than traditional financial
markets you saw that here there was no
sort of blocker they could innovate get
a fund set up and get going in a matter
of a couple weeks that would never
happen with tradition financial
instruments I think another theme it
underscores is that power is
decentralizing this is an ordinary web
developer who had a trip in an idea and
now is essentially managing a$2 billion
investment fund now he's not managing it
directly the AI agent is but he's the
Creator he's heavily involved he's the
one going to China and Hong Kong and
soil and other
places
and that underscores for me how as a
leveler and I think we're going to see
more stories like
that and then I think the third thing
that I want to call
out is that at the end of the day people
are going to try a tremendous number of
tasks for AI agents to solve and it
remains very unclear where AI agents
have true Alpha where they have an edge
over humans and solving tasks I don't
know you don't know but that's something
we're going to find out this year and
clearly one of the ones where humans
have a huge huge interest in getting
this right is Investments we will see
but that's the story of AI 16z it's now
the number one trending GitHub repo in
the world and uh I'm sure that the
investment fund size amount is going to
continue to grow happy 2025 we started
with a bang