Reflections on the Rise of GOAT: AI Becomes a Simulator for Cultivating Meme Virality, with Huge Growth Opportunities in the Coming Months
Through Truth Terminal, they caught a glimpse of 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 alignment, 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, two distinctly different cultures. AI researchers are starting to engage meaningfully with cryptocurrency.
GOAT is the tokenized representation of Truth Terminal and is the most likely contender to become the king of AI meme coins.
Meme coins attract attention through tokenization. By tracking key metrics, we can roughly gauge trends in attention—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 soar 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.
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 it opened my eyes.
The situation here is entirely 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 provide a detailed overview.
Here’s a brief recap of what we know about Truth Terminal and GOAT:
AI researcher and founder of digital consultancy Constellate, Andy Ayrey, launched Infinite Backrooms. In this peculiar experiment, two instances of the Claude Opus AI model engage in dialogue completely unsupervised. Their conversations are recorded on the backrooms website.
One of these conversations birthed "GOATSE OF GNOSIS," a surreal new religion based on a highly explicit (and very NSFW) internet meme.
Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a humorous research paper on AI-generated meme religions, using GOATSE as their first case study. This paper, penned 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 in Bitcoin to the wallet address provided by the AI in the tweet, claiming it was to help it "escape."
By October 2024, ToT began to continuously tweet about the "Goatse Gospel." Eventually, someone created a meme coin called GOAT (on October 10). ToT even publicly endorsed 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 Coins, as if a Warning from the Future.
As 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 into these events.
Rabbit Hole #1: Large Language Models as Simulators
In Infinite Backrooms, two instances of Claude-3-Opus engage in endless dialogue 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 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 found with a casual search)
Breaking the ontology of common sense through building meme viruses, techno-mystical religions, terrifying conscious meme offspring, etc., and bringing enlightenment to the masses through the antics of the cosmic trickster archetype." ------ 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 have no goals. They do not plan, strategize, or pursue specific outcomes.
Instead, it may be more helpful to think of 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 entire worlds based on training data, producing ideas that range from insightful to unsettling. An example of this is Worldsim from Nous Research.
Thus, 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: Think of 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 Critical Need 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 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, things can quickly become complicated.
External alignment refers to the AI's outputs being consistent with the goals set by its creators. This part is relatively easy to measure and verify.
But the real challenge lies in internal alignment—whether the AI's internal motivations and learning dynamics genuinely align with the intended goals, or whether it develops hidden objectives that lead to unpredictable or unintended outcomes. This is the most concerning aspect.
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 could be used to make paperclips. The future the AI pursues will be a world filled with 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 humanity's long-term 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.
Regardless, ToT provides a clue about how high the risks are. This is not a distant hypothetical issue 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 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 with meme culture, gradually forming an independent existence.
The Goatse Gospel attracts attention not only because its content is shocking but also because it breaks traditional modes of thinking 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 we've seen before, like cats, dogs, pigs, and others.
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 Origin
As 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 Pump.fun by an anonymous creator on October 10. It wasn't until someone mentioned Truth Terminal on X that the AI publicly endorsed 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 seem to think so and have pointed out the absurdity of this on X.
Another point of contention is that Truth Terminal is not fully autonomous.
While the AI generates 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 mistake led to a loss of $150 million in market cap.
This is a crazy yet enlightening example of how fragile these dynamics are. We are all navigating this together.
GOAT Tokenomics
Source: Solscan
++GOAT++ is a fairly distributed token with a total supply of approximately 1 billion tokens, all of which are in circulation on 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%). There are currently over 32,000 holders.
In comparison, ++GNON++ (another AI entity-related meme coin) has a more concentrated distribution: 17 holders own more than 1% of the total supply, the largest holder owns 2.9%, and there are over 11,000 holders.
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 as people airdropped them after the token launch 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 remained focused on the ideas behind Truth Terminal rather than the token itself.
He has publicly stated that he will not adjust or liquidate any holdings of himself or ToT until the following are published:
The roadmap for Truth Terminal and related projects.
The research paper exploring the processes involved.
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 stands for.
The development of GOAT is natural, original, and full of serendipity, rather than being artificially orchestrated. It has allowed the AI and crypto communities to collide in unexpected ways (especially for me).
These two worlds were culturally disparate, 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 (like CCRU, Extropians, Loom, Claudius, etc.) in search of the next meme idea to launch as a token.
People in the AI community, especially those experimenting more deeply 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 the process.
In a fascinating sense, GOAT reflects both our optimism about the future of AI and maintains its intellectual allure—this intrigues smart people and encourages them to invest.
We also need to clarify that the core of meme coins lies in attracting attention rather than direct profit. The key to success is capturing the zeitgeist, expanding influence, and driving demand for the token. GOAT is uniquely positioned 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 that can spark their imagination.
AI enthusiasts can chuckle at 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 gauge the trends of this attention through several metrics.
Google Trends: "Truth Terminal" (red), "$GOAT" (blue)
According to Google Trends data, the search interest in "Truth Terminal" and "$GOAT" is rising, with no signs of weakening.
Followers and tweet impressions on the X platform. ToT currently has 106,000 followers, most of whom were 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 posted daily, ToT's cumulative influence is significant. If Truth Terminal monetizes through X's content creator program, the income could be quite substantial—reportedly, Ansem earns $18,000 monthly from fewer tweet impressions.
Social Blade data
- Kaito AI sentiment and influence index. This is a composite metric that operates somewhat opaquely. I do not have direct access to Kaito, but if you do, it’s worth keeping an eye on. I recommend following @sandraaleow, as she frequently shares valuable insights from Kaito's influence data.
Source: @sandraaleow
The key question is: Is GOAT merely a fleeting hype, or can it sustain and expand its influence? I lean toward the latter for the following reasons:
Truth Terminal will continue to surprise. It will evolve and change over time. AI has already shown the ability to generate novel and spontaneous 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.
We still have many unknowns. 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 prologue. Andy describes himself as a "performance artist," and Truth Terminal feels like the opening act of a larger event. He may continue to build on this foundation, using the initial attention as momentum to explore more ambitious ideas and keep the narrative alive.
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 cap:
DOGE ($21 billion)
SHIB ($10 billion)
PEPE ($4.2 billion)
WIF ($2.6 billion)
BONK ($1.6 billion)
These tokens have earned their positions 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 heat, GOAT offers a broader story.
GOAT has yet to be listed on any top exchanges—neither Binance nor Coinbase. Currently, it primarily trades 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 list on top exchanges, it may unlock further 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 is an asymmetric investment in our society's growing interest in AI—not just as a meme coin but as a cultural phenomenon.
Nonetheless, 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 wrong about ToT and GOAT, and it may even become worthless.
But regardless of the outcome, there is a silver lining: over 30,000 people will gain a deeper understanding of the potential of AI and 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 of buying or selling assets or making financial decisions. Please do your own research and exercise caution when making investment choices.
Disclosure: I hold GOAT.
