The AI Dispatch #30- August in the AI Trenches, Backroom, Caesar AI

Robots and gentlemen, here’s another edition of our weekly AI newsletter!

As always, we’ll dive deep into a market overview, dive deep into the main performers of the week and conclude with a roundup of the weekly AI news.

Welcome to the AI dispatch!

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Market Overview

Honestly, this part of the newsletter often feels i am repeating myself. It appears that we’re hanging our bullish bias on a thread. While Bitcoin seem to still care enough not to completely destroy the 117k support, a strong movement on the downside could not only bring the whole AI sector down with it, but also signal a change of trend.

Nonetheless, it is with moderate entuhusiasm that we highlight a slow bounce for the AI sector as a whole, up 30% in a matter of a couple of weeks. Nonetheless, we’ve been oscillating in this $10-14b range for a while now, with peaks down to $8b.

Most smaller agents are also up on the weekly, but still hovering around the same levels previous to the recent Bitcoin crash to ATH down to $117k.

This week, we focus on one in particular, which has performed well recently: Backroom.

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On Backroom

We’ve already introduced Backroom in one of our previous AI dispatches.

Anyway, here’s a TLDR:

Backroom provides “tokenised access to information” and another way for creators to activate their network.

On the one hand, creators are able to monetise their insights into rooms, where each room is private and gated by keys.

On the other hand, the creator fatigue is reduced through the use of an AI system, solving most of the pain points creators previously experienced on FriendTech, for instance.

This way, creators can focus on sharing signal, while leaving everything else to AI.

The key promise of Backroom is to allow creators to manage their room effortlessly. Each creator will, in fact, be able to leverage AI agents by inputting them into an information source of their choice, and have the AI conduct its research, reading and translating the data into shareable insights.

Both key trading and royalties are powered by the $ROOM token.

Backroom went live on August 15th and, since then, has been the main talk of town within the Virtuals ecosystem.

We’ve briefly mentioned in the past how it works, with a similar concept of Friend tech but reinforced by a stronger tokenomics and a focus on quality creators.

All of this with only a few big names having rooms in there, mostly influential people within Virtuals.

Is it worth opening a room? Here’s Evans sharing some stats for his day one:

How does it fit within the broader Virtuals flywheel, you might be asking? Our friendly neighbourhood lion has got us covered:

Here’s some more speculation on Backroom by a Virtuals OG:

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Weekly News Roundup

• We all know AI is going to be pervasive in a few years, just how much is not clear.

Here are some of its main applications:

• We’ve also heard good things about Caesar, an AI system focused on research:

Expectations are high, as it has been performing quite well compared to other models:

Currently, the platform is only available for members on the allow list.

We’ll get it and let you know.

• It’s no secret that financial applications are the most fitting for AI, here Bebis dives deeper into why this will be inevitable:

  

• An insightful and practical experience of the pros and cons of building an application using AI:

• Portfolio update from Virtual Ventures: How are we doing within the Virtuals ecosystem?

In other Virtuals news, they are launching a big hackathon with over $100k in prizes.

After strong initial traction, the Virtual flywheel has been struggling lately. Among other reasons, none of the projects launched via Genesis Launches has managed to establish itself as a household name and get traction.

Will Virtual’s Killer app emerge from this hackathon?

Or will it be one of the upcoming new agents, such as the Bse Trench Alliance (BTA) by Altcoinist, “a coordinated AI trading network of specialised agents scanning the chain, surfacing opportunities, and executing in real time”:

Compared to the last couple of weeks of radio silence, this week we’ve seen increasing activity on virtuals, and new launches of interesting projects:

1. Opz:

   

2. Ethy

   

• We’re always happy when we see AI-focused updates within the Arbitrum ecosystem. Arbus is surely one to watch:

  

What’s the best thing to do during this period? To each his own, but here are some insights by Jeff:

• While we mostly cover agents within the Base/Solana ecosystem, it’s great to see the official Ethereum account sharing more about their vision for AI agents on mainnet:

  

• USD AI also recently announced their $13m Series A round and is going live today:

That’s all guys - hope you enjoyed and see you last week!

We hope you’re also getting some relaxation and you’re reading this on the beach.

Ciao!