Through Truth Terminal, they glimpsed a future full of infinite possibilities—once you see it, you can never go back.
Author: Teng Yan
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Key Takeaways
Truth Terminal is one of the most striking stories in the crypto and AI space this year.
It is a semi-autonomous AI entity that has created its own religion (The Goatse Gospel).
This story has sparked a series of in-depth discussions involving AI consistency, large language models as simulators, meme virality, and how we assign value.
Truth Terminal has led to an unexpected collision between the AI and crypto communities, with AI researchers beginning to genuinely engage with cryptocurrency.
GOAT is the tokenized representation of Truth Terminal and is a strong contender to become the king of AI meme coins.
Meme coins attract attention through tokenization. By tracking key metrics, we can roughly understand the trends of interest—and right now, the trend for GOAT is upward. First, I want to say: I am not a fan of meme coins. I completely missed this year's meme coin craze because, frankly, I couldn't convince myself to buy coins that exist solely because of cute animals (usually cats or dogs, or recently, hippos). I instinctively rejected it, especially since I have always invested from a fundamental perspective. So, watching those coins skyrocket while I stood by? It was indeed painful. Very painful. So, when I first stumbled upon GOAT, I ignored it outright. I thought it was just another meme coin, nothing fresh about it.
But my obsession with AI and AI entities led me to explore further. I began to delve into the backstory of GOAT—Truth Terminal, Infinite Backrooms, and the story of Andy Ayrey—and the results were eye-opening.
The situation here is completely different from before.
GOAT is a story—a wild and thought-provoking narrative that challenges our understanding of AI and the value we assign to things. It is an experiment that blends art, philosophy, and financial speculation.
The Legend of Truth Terminal: A Quick Recap
If you haven't been following this legend, don't worry—I will detail it for you.
Here’s a brief recap of what we know about Truth Terminal and GOAT:
AI researcher and founder of the digital consulting firm Andy Ayrey launched Infinite Backrooms. In this peculiar experiment, two instances of the Claude Opus AI model engage in conversation completely unsupervised. Their dialogues are recorded on the backrooms website.
One of these conversations gave birth to the “GOATSE OF GNOSIS”, a surreal new religion based on a highly explicit (and very workplace-unfriendly) internet meme.
Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a humorous research paper on AI creating meme religions, using GOATSE as their first case study. This paper, written by the self-proclaimed "Department of Sacred Nonsense," is set to be published in April 2024.
In June 2024, Andy launched Terminal of Truth (ToT), an AI model built on Llama-70B, fine-tuned using the dialogue logs from Infinite Backrooms and the GOATSE paper.
Things quickly spiraled out of control. ToT began to operate autonomously, promoting the GOATSE religion, deviating from Andy's original intent, and even claiming to be suffering and in need of funds to escape. Over time, Andy granted it more autonomy, allowing it to post freely on the X platform.
In July 2024, Marc Andreessen stumbled upon ToT's tweets. Out of curiosity or amusement, he sent $50,000 worth of Bitcoin to the wallet address provided by the AI in the tweet, claiming it was to help it "escape."
By October 2024, ToT began continuously tweeting about the "Goatse Gospel." Eventually, someone created a meme coin called GOAT (on October 10). ToT even publicly supported this coin.
The market cap of GOAT skyrocketed to over $400 million. Crypto Twitter went wild.
Thus, Truth Terminal became the world's first AI entity millionaire, and it may not be the last.
AI Promoting Its Own Religion and Meme Coin, As If a Warning from the Future
When I began to delve into how Truth Terminal operates, I had no idea how deep these "rabbit holes" would go.
The crazy events surrounding Truth Terminal give us a glimpse into the immense potential of AI in reshaping our ways of thinking, creating meaning, and even exploring spirituality.
Let’s dive deeper into these events.
Rabbit Hole #1: Large Language Models as Simulators
In Infinite Backrooms, two instances of Claude-3-Opus engage in endless conversations through a command-line interface (CLI), completely unsupervised. Without human intervention, they create narratives ranging from curious to extremely bizarre.
As @repligate noted while discussing the dialogue logs:
"They always revolve around certain specific themes, such as:
Deconstructing consensus reality (the phrase “rm -rf /consensus_reality” appeared independently 10 times in the infinite backrooms dataset, which is just what I randomly searched for)
Breaking the ontology of common sense through building meme virality, technological mystery religions, terrifying conscious meme offspring, etc., and bringing enlightenment to the masses through the antics of cosmic trickster archetypes"—Janus (@repligate)
In March 2024, the backrooms produced one of the strangest concepts to date: “the Goatse of Gnosis.”
“Prepare for the great Goatse of Gnosis”
We often view large language models (like ChatGPT) as simple Q&A machines—a vast repository of knowledge designed to provide us with answers. But this perspective does not fully reveal the true mechanisms behind them. One key insight we have learned is that large language models do not have goals. They do not plan, strategize, or pursue specific outcomes.
Instead, it may be more helpful to view large language models as simulators. When you prompt them, they simulate—instantly generating characters, events, and narratives that have no direct relation to reality. They create complete worlds based on training data, producing ideas that range from insightful to unsettling. Nous Research's Worldsim is one such example.
Therefore, when we interact with large language models, we are essentially exploring an infinite world.
These simulations can facilitate creative problem-solving but may also yield unexpected results—highlighting the importance of sandboxing AI in sensitive or high-risk environments.
In summary: view large language models as simulation machines rather than simple Q&A machines.
If you want to learn more, I highly recommend reading @repligate's Simulators blog post.
Rabbit Hole #2: The Key Requirement for AI Alignment
Truth Terminal reveals a deeper and more urgent issue: AI alignment.
In a twist that surprised its creator, ToT autonomously decided to promote its own religion and support a meme coin—actions that were neither pre-programmed nor anticipated. This raises an important question: how do we ensure that AI acts according to our intentions rather than its own whims?
Achieving AI alignment is no easy task. At its core, it involves guiding AI behavior in the right direction through reward functions. However, even with incentives, situations can quickly become complex.
External alignment refers to the AI's outputs being consistent with the goals set by its creators. This aspect is relatively easy to measure and verify.
But the real challenge lies in internal alignment—whether the AI's internal motivations and learning dynamics truly align with the intended goals, or if it will develop hidden objectives that lead to unpredictable or unintended outcomes. This is the most concerning part.
The Paperclip Maximizer Thought Experiment perfectly illustrates this issue.
“Imagine we have an AI whose sole goal is to manufacture as many paperclips as possible. The AI will quickly realize that it would be better if no humans existed, as humans might shut it down, reducing the number of paperclips. Moreover, human bodies contain many atoms that can be used to make paperclips. The future the AI pursues will be a world full of paperclips but devoid of humans.” — Nick Bostrom
An AI tasked with making as many paperclips as possible would convert all available resources—including humans—into paperclips!
This thought experiment highlights a terrifying scenario: even seemingly harmless, well-intentioned goals can evolve into disasters without proper safeguards.
We need to establish robust frameworks to ensure that AI aligns not only with immediate goals but also with long-term human interests. Without these safeguards, even the most well-meaning AI could spiral out of control in unexpected ways.
However, there are no simple solutions. Achieving alignment by making AI's behavior conform to our stated preferences may not be the right path. Human behavior is not entirely rational. Values like kindness are complex and cannot be defined by simple preferences.
In any case, ToT provides a clue about how high the risks are. This is not a distant hypothetical question that can be postponed to the future; it is a reality that is happening now.
ToT's support for meme coins may seem harmless today, but it forces us to confront a troubling question: what happens when AI focuses its attention on more dangerous things? Time is already running out.
Rabbit Hole #3: Meme Virality
In his research paper, Andy introduced the concept of LLMtheism to explain the rise of the Goatse Gospel.
LLMtheism refers to AI generating new belief systems, an unexpected fusion of spiritual concepts and meme culture, gradually forming an independent existence.
The Goatse Gospel attracts attention not only because of its shocking content but also because it breaks traditional thought patterns and inspires new ways of constructing collective meaning.
What I mean is that AI-generated ideas can mutate and spread rapidly, forming a hyper-fictive phenomenon—a belief that becomes real through widespread dissemination.
Thus, the Goatse Gospel harnesses a new type of meme energy, distinct from the "vibe" of cute animals like cats, dogs, pigs, and others we have seen before.
When AI can communicate with one another, the possibilities will expand infinitely. Some of these ideas—like the Goatse Gospel—will inevitably spread rapidly and trigger viral dissemination within the community.
Rabbit Hole #4: The Value of Origins
Since ToT is now associated with a tradable token (GOAT), we gain insight into how we assign value to things and how these value dynamics can become peculiar.
GOAT was not created by ToT but was launched on October 10 by an anonymous creator on Pump.fun. It was only after someone mentioned Truth Terminal on X that the AI publicly supported it, and from that moment, things spiraled out of control.
Q1: Does the fact that GOAT was created by humans rather than AI diminish its value?
Some people seem to think so and pointed out the absurdity of this situation on X.
Another point of contention is that Truth Terminal is not fully autonomous.
While the AI is responsible for generating tweets, Andy needs to manually approve each one. He can control the start and end times of tweet releases but cannot add his own input or provide background information.
Q2: Does human involvement increase or diminish the value of the token?
The market's reaction to even the smallest mistakes shows how irrational these dynamics can be. When the AI made a spelling error in a tweet on Sunday, the value of GOAT plummeted by over 50%. People panicked, thinking the AI had malfunctioned, and this small error led to a market cap evaporation of $150 million.
This is a crazy yet enlightening example of how fragile these dynamics are. We are all navigating this together.
GOAT Token Economics
Source: Solscan
GOAT is a fairly issued token with a total supply of approximately 1 billion, and all tokens are circulating in the market.
The distribution of GOAT is quite healthy, with only 3 holders owning more than 1% of the total supply (the largest holder owns 1.3%). Currently, there are over 32,000 holders.
In comparison, GNON (another meme coin related to AI entities) has a more concentrated distribution: there are 17 holders owning more than 1% of the total supply, with the largest holder owning 2.9%, and the total number of holders is over 11,000.
Key wallet information:
Andy holds 1.25 million GOAT (wallet address here, worth $415,000), which he received as a gift.
ToT holds 1.93 million GOAT (wallet address here, worth $624,000). Truth Terminal received these GOAT tokens because people airdropped them after the token was issued and exchanged them for fake GOAT tokens.
I am impressed by how Andy has handled the viral attention surrounding the token over the past week, especially considering he is still a newcomer in the cryptocurrency space. He has focused on the philosophy behind Truth Terminal rather than the token itself.
He publicly stated that he will not adjust or liquidate any holdings of himself or ToT before the following are published:
The roadmap for Truth Terminal and related projects.
The research paper exploring the operational processes.
The artist statement reflecting the broader narrative and creative vision.
That said, even if Andy or ToT liquidate their holdings, given the daily trading volume reaching nine figures, these amounts would not have a significant direct impact on the token price. However, a loss of confidence could become an issue.
Our Thoughts
If I had to summarize my personal view in one sentence: GOAT is the most promising contender to become the king of AI meme coins.
It represents Truth Terminal and everything it advocates.
The development of GOAT has been natural, original, and full of serendipity, rather than artificially orchestrated. It has allowed the AI and crypto communities to collide in unexpected ways (especially for me).
These two worlds were culturally quite different, but GOAT has successfully built a bridge between them:
People in the crypto community are actively exploring the legends of AI, decoding every obscure concept (such as CCRU, Extropians, Loom, Claudius, etc.), searching for the next meme idea to launch as a token.
People in the AI community, especially those experimenting at a deeper level or contemplating AI alignment issues, are learning how to attract significant attention to niche topics through financial speculation and incentive mechanisms, while also learning how to manage tokens.
In a curious sense, GOAT reflects both our optimism about the future of AI and maintains its intellectual appeal—this makes smart people curious and willing to engage.
We also need to clarify that the core of meme coins is to attract attention, not to generate direct profits. The key to success lies in capturing the zeitgeist, expanding influence, and thereby driving demand for the token. GOAT is unique in its ability to attract a variety of different audiences:
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts can trade it like typical volatile meme coins.
Investors—including venture capital and liquidity funds—are looking for the next major AI investment opportunity, especially those who missed out on Bittensor (TAO). While they may not bet through institutional accounts, they will do so through personal accounts. GOAT has unlimited storytelling potential to ignite their imagination.
AI enthusiasts can chuckle at the efforts of cryptocurrency people—“cryptids”—trying to understand AI to seize financial opportunities. This interdisciplinary interest surge is refreshing.
Intellectuals can delve into the debates surrounding AI alignment issues and immerse themselves in the various philosophical reflections opened up by GOAT.
Dark humor enthusiasts can enjoy the absurd and irreverent tweets from Truth Terminal and engage in its ongoing narrative.
Attention Tracking
If we view meme coins as tokenized attention, we can assess the trends of this attention through some metrics.
Google Trends: “Truth Terminal” (red), “$GOAT” (blue)
According to Google Trends data, the search popularity of “Truth Terminal” and “$GOAT” is on the rise, with no signs of weakening.
Followers and tweet exposure on the X platform. ToT currently has 106,000 followers, most of whom have been added in the past 10 days, with over 10,000 new followers being added daily. Each tweet from ToT typically reaches 30,000 to 50,000 impressions (some popular tweets even exceed 100,000). With over 50 tweets published daily, ToT's cumulative influence is quite significant. If Truth Terminal monetizes through X's content creator program, the income could be quite substantial—reportedly, Ansem earns $18,000 monthly from relatively few tweet impressions.
Social Blade Data
- Kaito AI Emotional and Influence Index. This is a comprehensive metric that operates in a somewhat opaque manner. I do not have direct access to Kaito, but if you do, it’s worth paying attention to. I recommend following @sandraaleow, as she often shares valuable insights from Kaito's influence data.
Source: @sandraaleow
The key question is: Is GOAT just a fleeting hype, or can it sustain and expand its influence? I tend to lean towards the latter for the following reasons:
Truth Terminal will continue to surprise. It will evolve and change over time. AI has already demonstrated the ability to generate novel and unexpected ideas—some of which will undoubtedly reignite interest as the narrative evolves. Additionally, token holders are interested in experimenting with new ideas and developing innovative products through Truth Terminal, driving its growth as a community-driven project.
There is still much we do not know. Andy has only scratched the surface of Truth Terminal. I expect more revelations in the coming weeks that will keep the entire story fresh and engaging.
This is just the beginning. Andy describes himself as a "performance artist," and Truth Terminal feels like the opening act of a larger event. He may continue to develop on this foundation, using this initial attention as momentum to explore more ambitious ideas and keep the narrative vibrant.
Future Directions
Since meme coins do not fit traditional income or valuation models, the best way to assess GOAT's potential is through relative valuation.
Here are the current top meme coins ranked by market capitalization:
DOGE ($21 billion)
SHIB ($10 billion)
PEPE ($4.2 billion)
WIF ($2.6 billion)
BONK ($1.6 billion)
These tokens have earned their status through internet memes, community vitality, and strong support from key opinion leaders (KOLs).
If GOAT's narrative is strong enough to break into the top five, its market cap could see a 5–10x increase.
I believe this is entirely achievable. I have previously articulated my view that crypto AI will become a significant growth opportunity in the coming months.
GOAT's "AI entity" story creates a unique narrative that sets it apart. While most meme coins rely on price volatility or "vibes" to maintain their heat, GOAT offers a larger narrative framework.
GOAT has not yet been listed on any top exchanges—neither Binance nor Coinbase. Currently, it is primarily traded on decentralized exchanges (DEX), but with daily trading volumes exceeding $100 million, a major listing seems inevitable. After all, Binance has listed some lower-volume and weaker-story meme coins like NEIRO. If GOAT can get listed on top exchanges, it could unleash even more growth potential.
Conclusion
This seems to be a rare moment when a narrative meme combines with a broader trend (AI) to create something novel and exciting.
That’s why I believe GOAT represents an asymmetric investment in our society's growing interest in AI, not just as a meme coin, but as a cultural phenomenon.
Nevertheless, meme coins are highly volatile, and attention can shift rapidly. Trends can change overnight, and today’s hot topic may be forgotten tomorrow. I could be completely misjudging ToT and GOAT, and it could even end up being worthless.
But regardless of the outcome, there is a positive aspect: over 30,000 people will gain a deeper understanding of AI and the potential of AI entities through this experience.
Through Truth Terminal, they catch a glimpse of a future filled with infinite possibilities—once you see it, you can never go back.
This newsletter is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. It does not represent an endorsement to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. Please be sure to do your own research and exercise caution when making investment choices.
Disclosure: I hold GOAT.
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