Still Early? The AI Investing Secret Animoca’s Founder is Betting On ｜Yat Siu ｜Bonnie Blockchain

This is sort of one of the things that we see as a real game changer for a lot of retail investors. They can't just focus on one thing. That's not how the world works anymore. If you are widely invested, those are going to be several hundred X's because their productivity growth in AI is not 10% or 20%. The productivity growth in AI is literally a thousand X. So we think the return profile is going to be a thousand X amongst sort of, you know, the top companies. Advertising is an almost $900 billion industry a year which is all about discovery and that it'll completely be flipped upside down. All of that value is going to go to the agents who are going to find stuff for you and they're going to do microtransactions off the back.

So, I think there's a funny comment here. Okay, except for chips, energy, data center, what else can I invest? We're at the early stages. It's a little bit like, am I investing in sort of OpenAI or sort of Anthropic literally 5 years ago? If you look at the AI race, it's not just Google or Anthropic or OpenAI. Look at the Chinese players. You've got Kimi, you've got MiniMax. That's kind of the phase that we are on the agentic AI side. So the Animoca Brands sort of playbook is...

Well, actually, I think it's perfect because you could have many versions of yourself out there. You can basically sort of in a way sort of rent your identity. You already see this with companies like ElevenLabs that are basically renting people's voices in terms of their sort of, you know, voice acting skills or the recording. You know, wouldn't you love to be able to sort of, you know, have a version of yourself that can help others if you had a way of doing it. We used to call that books by the way, right? We used to write things down in books and then we would sell those books to other people to help them, to guide them, to give our ideas, to give our philosophy and then that will help them in their life, right? And now we just have a more distributed version which is that we've gone from writing to someone who can actually do stuff for you. Actually I think that's the power of agent AI.

Yeah. Well, that's a different, I mean that's, I mean that's maybe a different form of acting shall we say, right? And I think that is more an issue of disclosure. By the way, I think blockchain solves that, right? Because well, digital identity, right? So you don't have to, for instance, you don't have to prove that the person on the other side is a particular name because, you know, maybe they want to be anonymous, you know, they're on OnlyFans, they don't want to be seen outside, but you want to know if it's a dude or a girl, right? So at least on the blockchain, you can certify, okay, well, I won't tell you who he or she might be, but you know, this person's actually a guy or actually a woman depending on what it is, right? So those are the type of things that we will need for certification because it's not just about deep fakes. It's just generally about sort of, you know, authenticity, right? One of the problems we have right now is authenticity and authentic layers are actually centralized. You know, we go to Facebook or Google or Apple to tell us who's real, so to speak. I mean, even our passports don't really matter because the governments aren't set up this way, right? You know, even if you go on something like Tinder, for instance, and you keep swiping, do you know if it's a guy or girl? You have no idea if it's really a guy or girl, right? But you need some kind of certification that says yes, verified or not. You rely on those centralized platforms to do the work. What's a decentralized answer? Digital identity basically, you identify yourself, you do the KYC, you do the recording, your wallet basically might be that proof point and then you know he or she whether he's real or not and you may not necessarily have to know anything about that person's identity because that's the other thing, you know, if I want to share my identity, prove who I am, I have to give everything about myself to that platform right for the most part, right? Which is actually not necessary. I have to be able to log to a website whether it's a Facebook or Google or whatever and just be able to give them just what they need to know about me, not everything about me. I think that's actually one of the issues we have about data privacy today.

Yeah. But this is something that we can store in our own sovereign cloud, right? So if I basically have the data stored on blockchain in the same way that I have something that's stored, I own the keys, then if Google says, you know, like they will say, okay, I need to know your name and identity. Maybe if I go OnlyFans, I need to know your, you know, basically whether you're male, female, or whatever, right? You know, I guess we're in America, so let's be diverse here. But either way, right, you have to be able to sort of define that and you can then say and if you refuse to do so because you say, 'Oh, I have to share that.' Then you refuse to do so, either it's flagged or you're not allowed to sign up, right? It's as simple as that, right? Because right now, you can just lie about it, right? And you can just pretend and you can do other things like this. And that's just something that I think as we want to scale that type of, let's call it, reputation, doesn't work.

Well, actually it's not really a pivot from our perspective. I mean because first of all we, you know, we've always been doing stuff in games. Yeah. And you know, I know this sort of changed the naming into it's the metaverse and that kind of stuff. We should talk about that because from our perspective what's actually happening with MINDS and with the agentic AI is just an extension of what the metaverse really should be. So let me just sort of go back on this and also quickly on the investment side. Animoca really, we're not a fund, right? So we haven't really been investing like a fund manager. We invested in companies for strategic reasons because we thought that, you know, back then whether it was NFTs, whether it was, you know, the metaverse, whether it was gaming, that this would be a really big push. And I have to also point out that in '21 and '22 the largest onchain push our industry ever had was NFTs and gaming, right? And really, you know, I would argue that over the last three or four years we've had many events that have basically hurt the industry as a whole which basically sort of stopped that in its tracks. Things like, you know, FTX if you remember, Terra Luna, the relentless pursuit of basically Gensler against the industry which really, you know, again might seem like a distant memory but it was just a year or so ago where our industry basically was still very much sort of under siege, right? So we're just coming out of that now. To the point about sort of, you know, MINDS and, you know, the investment thing, what we're doing here. So, you know, the thing that we've been thinking about now is maybe what we got about the metaverse was somewhat wrong, right? And not wrong in the sense that, you know, it's important but wrong how it would sort of impact our life because, you know, we talked about the goggles, people talked about going into the metaverse, right? However when you think about what's happening with AI agents, it's not, you know, I have 200 AI agents but most people have somewhere between three to five or 10 or they think they will have at least three to five or 10. That means we're going to have tens of billions of agents floating around the world, right? And what do they do? They help our calendar, they may do trading for us, they make money for us, they work for us, they're impacting our physical life. So the way that we're thinking about this now is that it's not so much that sort of, you know, we go into the metaverse but rather the metaverse is coming to us, right? And all of the AI agents basically out there actually doing the work and supporting us are actually basically just the extension of basically a digital society if it were that's supporting humanity and also...

Well they exist virtually so all the interactions between each other...

Well, that's the point, right? So, to your point, one of the precursors of AI has really been in gaming with NPCs, but they've been very, very dumb, right? And I think we may have spoken about this at your show where we basically said that, you know, we believe that sort of NPCs once you get to this point where they have that kind of intelligence are going to be the next extension. But I think what we didn't quite fully appreciate is that it's not that the NPCs themselves become smarter, which clearly they can be now with agentic AI, is that these NPCs can now actually impact our physical life because they do my flight bookings. That's not a virtual thing. It might be done virtually because they're using Duffel or they're using Trip.com or they're using like this, but the impact is my physical life, right? And so this is sort of one of the things that we see as a real game changer. And most people when they think AI are still in ChatGPT mode, like I'm searching, I'm doing stuff as opposed to someone that's doing stuff for you, right? And so that for us is basically why we launched this fund because what we're doing now is we're saying, hey, there's this new big shift change. Most people don't understand it. You know, we want to fund that. And that's the same thing that we saw with gaming and with NFTs and frankly with ARBs later and even things like with stablecoins that, you know, when you're early to the game then you have an advantage and that's why we're sort of launching this $10 million sort of investment opportunity.

Well who owns the agent though, right? So if the agent is owned by someone then, you know, that agent who gets richer, they get that benefit, right? But I think there is an interesting point here around so when people talk about ghost GDP, right, to me it's a little bit like sort of Adam Smith's invisible hand sort of theory, right? Which is basically that, you know, we have a system and an infrastructure that promotes essentially trade and transaction and really effectively a form of capitalism. The actual benefits come in other ways, right? So you call it a ghost GDP. But that ghost GDP actually translates into other benefits because if the agents become wealthier, then guess what happens? People want to sell stuff to those agents too. Entire new economies come where humans either create agents or themselves want to go and say, 'Hey, look at this. I want to offer you something here. I want to offer you basically, you know, whatever sort of services.' And we see this right now, right? Right now when everyone's talking about launching a website, they're no longer talking about website. They're talking about launching an MCP server or maybe CLI or basically some way in which they can address who, not the human, but the agent.

Well, I mean deprioritize is probably the wrong word because we think everything sort of moves in this sort of direction. It's kind of like...

Well, I mean we, you know, we're doing less gaming investments but that's not because, you know, we're not doing less gaming investments because we don't believe in gaming. We're doing less gaming investments because we already have over 230 gaming investments, right? So the point is that we're quite indexed towards that industry as well, right? The mental model that we have around where we are in the industry is that it's very much like the early days of the internet, right? And so that means that we think every section of the web is going to alter and change and so we want to have a broad exposure to it as a whole, right? And so that means, you know, we're not just in AI, we're also in RWAs, we're also in the sort of, you know, deep end of course DeFi and so forth. That's kind of how we're constructed. We have over, you know, 620 portfolio companies. We hope to have thousands in the future, right? So we're not, you know, we're, it's different if we're a fund, right? If we're a fund, then we have to be very focused on sort of maybe the shorter term returns. We have to think about that. But of course, broadly, we have to think of where the world is going. So if you ask to deprioritize, I mean, we wouldn't be investing in news sites for instance, right? Because we think news has to alter. But if there's something that focuses on how agents receive news, we might do that as well, right? Also existing businesses that have gone a certain direction have to change and focus on where the industry is going. Right? And so you do have the situation where sometimes companies are just not nimble enough or can't alter and switch. But those who are run by very sort of, you know, when you support a founder, the founders are actually the ones who know to pivot and change because they have to be dynamic, right? It's a, as a business you have to keep evolving. I keep telling people that, you know, Amazon was best known for selling books. Yeah. I mean sure they still sell books, right? But everything else is much, much wider than that. I mean, you know, you don't think of Amazon as a book seller despite the fact that they're probably still the largest book seller in the world, right?

Well, I mean, I think you need, you guys need AI agents, right? That's the very first thing you need. And I also think you need, and you know, if you don't have an MCP server or a CLI or something where agents can speak to you, you need to be agent discoverable so that when people have their agents and they want to get the news, right, that they will then serve for their human.