DX Research: McCarren Park Bench simulation explore future of labor w/ AI agents

McCarren Park Bench 6 - the future of labor with DX Research Group (@DXRGai) in a blockchain simulation of a parallel world - inhabited by agentic ai, initiated by economic crashes, and living on the blockchain for one week! CSA2D7 Heya @poof_eth @RattyMouseman @gremplin - congrats on the release today. Hanging out here whenever you're ready to chat gremplin Thank you CSA2D7 Heya gremplin - feeling pretty good? gremplin yep, it's really fun seeing what gunkbot has been busy cooking up patttttiiiiii Hiiii gremplin excited to see the whole experience unfold patttttiiiiii Hellooooo CSA2D7 Heya patti! For sure. I got a couple of lil traders Im ready to throw into this simulated world poof Hey!!! patttttiiiiii Tremendous poof Yeah it’s fun being surprised by the creations even tho we gave birth to them CSA2D7 Heya poof! Being surprised by your creations is a goal! I'm very happy the three of you were able to make it today. The chat can be a little hectic sometimes, and I think four is the most I've ever done at once. Basically we'll just chat about stuff and I'll cut and paste around it if it goes all over the place. As you would expect for this amount of people. And you can edit however you like Honestly, I don't know where to start. I've been listening to some of the podcasts you've done and they've all been wonderful - the one with fungibull and chris f both very good I don't want to rehash too much but I guess that's kind of unavoidable? poof Oh sorry and where do we want to chat I was realizing I was maybe looking in the wrong spot? CSA2D7 Right in here! gremplin this is the bench CSA2D7 This is the virtual bench patttttiiiiii we're benching gremplin im going to pull up google maps to understand what mccarren park even is and play some ambient native fauna sounds CSA2D7 Haha, McCarren Park is a park in Williamsburg gremplin pigeons it is CSA2D7 How about - how did the three of you meet the first time? I assume it was before the formation of DX Group? patttttiiiiii So gonna let poof take this one but I have a very funny story about meeting Gremplin, he threatened to fight me CSA2D7 If you don't threaten to fight someone, you aren't a real person 😂 gremplin Patti sniped a Chuck Anderson / NoPattern work i wanted - “Sciatic Hotfix” in the Imagined Wreckage collection CSA2D7 How did you find her after? gremplin people brought us together to battle CSA2D7 May I ask which people? patttttiiiiii Gremplin tweeted that he wanted to fight my user name CSA2D7 Ohhh nice one Gremplin patttttiiiiii so I slid into his DMs and was like "are you talking to me?" CSA2D7 Right, that's the normal thing to do after someone threatens you patttttiiiiii Exactly, which is why I did that CSA2D7 Taxi Driver - you talkin to me? Cause there's no one else in this DM it must be me you talkin to Where did Poof go? patttttiiiiii we've had some fires, let me see if we can lure him back CSA2D7 I saw the Opensea one? [Editor’s note: Opensea briefly delisted “DX Terminal” shortly after its initial launch.] I actually like Opensea a lot despite commiserating with Paul Seidler and their standards last chat patttttiiiiii I think let's continue CSA2D7 Ok, sounds good patttttiiiiii my guess is he will be back or we can fill the gaps patttttiiiiii I met Poof, I think via us both being active in the Terraforms discord. And unsure how @poof_eth and @gremplin met gremplin I met poof via... wailoaloa i think? wai, of Galverse, introduced me to poof in a very mysterious dm for something WAGDIE related CSA2D7 Too many words I don't get there... gremplin Galverse is an anime project, their anime is nearly complete, WAGDIE is 'we are all going to die' - a mysterious fantasy pixel art collection poof I’m sorry my power just went out so everything is rebooting; I'm back on line! CSA2D7 Alright! Welcome back Poof We were just chatting about how you all met pre-DX. Patti was regaling us with Gremplin's threat as some sort of wooing technique. But it worked, so patttttiiiiii I think you mean booing technique, but ok CSA2D7 Poof do you want to tell a story about this or no? I'm kind of fascinated by the production of a thing as much as the thing. And this project very much strikes me as one about the production of something poof well I think in terms of how we all met... I found that we were in similar circles... I want to say I started chit chatting with gremplin in the context of WAGDIE through Wai? Long ago and then he would come in and draw his caricatures of us during the KNW spaces gremplin ah true yes, i lurked poof notably giving allsee at the time huge head gear and braces for some reason which then we invited him to the discord CSA2D7 So basically this is gremplin's technique. To provoke and join gremplin that's the pattern im being confronted with, yes poof and then I want to say patti and I crossed paths a lot but didnt become besties until maybe the first crypto the game -- a little before that maybe? CSA2D7 And when did you decide to not incorporate DX Group, but form a group in an informal capacity? poof well technically we are a simple LLC haha, but it's something I think built for collaboration by design and maybe nomadic people coming and participating... this kind of was born out of me deciding I wanted to go full time crypto and wanting to go actually be able to focus on AI work but not trying to like... do something that often gets you trapped in both crypto but also AI where you end up with a very very hyper specific product that's geared towards something that becomes less relevant or maybe isn't as interesting over time put another way -- it felt too early to say "we are going to be AI art company making video" or whatever -- felt more exploratory... and there were other good reference points in terms of -- I remember talking to patti about this specifically early on.... regardless of what you think about them the coop type model of Mondragon was super interesting... also for me things like Uniswap/Consensys even ETH foundation... and then it felt like others who were doing things I was interested in were also following a similar path -- Nous Research definitely a partial inspiration although we are focused in a different area CSA2D7 Had you worked on very hyper specific products that became less relevant over time to you? poof personally not really -- I think even in my past life in true web0 corporate consumer product world -- I've always had roles that had enough variety / breadth to go work on to keep it interesting... I think it's more especially in AI and also crypto if you're not building for these kinds of catch fire moments that also can go away in a flash or a paradigm can shift under you really rapidly -- you can kind of be a sitting duck CSA2D7 For sure. How does that philosophy inform how you divide labor at DX Group? poof we all are crazy passionate, insanely productive and we all do too much. That's like core criteria or what it attracts both gremplin and patti started off as doing a little fun... small bit of help here and there and then i somehow got lucky enough to have them want to lean in and do more and more... very nice to have talented folks who care CSA2D7 So is it all hands and constant fire drill or do folks have separate specialties? For example - how did you address this Opensea delisting fiasco? poof oh different specialties -- any launch period is going to be a fire drill naturally so that's kind of exceptional, but during the process we have like loose horizontal design but everyone usually has one thing they are expert in / focused on still opensea -- the double enforcer of patti and gremplin took care of that in probably the fastest i have ever seen an OS issue get resolved CSA2D7 Very professional gremplin good cop bad cop crashout CSA2D7 Gremplin told them he wanted to fight, Patti came in and told them its all good I ask about labor because DX Terminal feels very much to me about the future of labor. Do you use any Agentic AI yourself with DX Group to help in tasks for creating DX terminal? poof yeah we all are heavy AI users. Specifically on this one we have our internal gunkjourney bot which is basically our midjourney for testing out the image generation pipeline and sketching together stuff and then we have tons and tons of these flows that help us better diagnose / work through the simulation... a lot of dealing with the issues in autonomously generative art for example... like our persona system -- it's really just a big agentic workflow where we try to open up the aperture on the creativity of the model but then have enough automated AI powered checks to go make sure... it fulfills the style criteria etc we want for example CSA2D7 I haven't played the game yet but the minting page and what I've seen on X feels like a very cohesive style Even the music - which @chilltulpa mentioned he listened to for three hours gremplin the game, which begins thursday, is very much an extension of what you've seen so far patttttiiiiii wait what?? really? that is tremendous! sorry poof I didn't mean to step in but love hearing how much ppl love the music CSA2D7 Haha yea, he mentioned it in here poof sorry what? you MUST step in. ill just blab gremplin ive left it looping for so long as well lol, its really pleasant poof it is yeah patttttiiiiii @Lonli thank you for music vibing 🙏 Lonli Really got lost in it, as a musician/composer myself I appreciate it so much. 🤍 poof sooo nice to hear this! i'm excited to have the little animal crossing type vibe shift in the game where you're looking through the different locations CSA2D7 So I've only seen the sprites on the minting page, but they are great. Are the sprites all 1/1s too? Is it accurate to call DX Terminal a game? poof yeah all the art is 1/1 AI generated -- basically the whole persona you can think of it as its own unique thing yeah it's a game I think but maybe also experience we keep saying or simulation. I've talked about this in a few pockets but one thing for us is kind of realizing how important games are to AI / progress in general just naturally and then how sort of surprisingly -- we are also inadvertently doing real state of the art research with this... there really hasnt' been a financial simulation of this scale CSA2D7 And I don't think I've seen this anywhere, but I assume DX Terminal is a reference to the 80’s style Bloomberg Terminal? poof yes 100%. Pattis idea to call it terminal btw and its a good multi-meaning very dense word patttttiiiiii also though you pointed out the dual meaning. Poof you were the one pointing out the absolute nihilism of the name in another context poof i love that stuff, geekin on some lit theory nerd stuff terminal velocity too, we had this grim image of people jumping off the tower as the start of the game on black monday... didnt make the cut in the end haha gremplin im happy with how that looked in my imagination lol CSA2D7 Yes... state of the art research, financial simulation of this scale ... we have to talk about this. And as you said the start of the game is 1989 black monday, but the blockchain exists in this parallel world What are some financial simulations or other simulations that you looked at as precedence for this project? I know Priyanka mentioned Sims on the podcast poof well I think we kind of started with some of the AI research ones -- there was this stanford one that I think captivated a lot of people in 2023... and we kind of realized after that... which was I think like 20 something agents simulating a little bit of time... there wasn't as much of this kind of research going on -- I think most recently someone has done like a 1000-2000 agent market simulation that covers maybe like 10 trades? there's a broader lineage of different ways of using simulation so dont want to make it seem like that's it, but kind of with specifically what we are doing -- LLM agents interacting live in an environment with clear goals etc -- this is definitely the biggest of its kind... which wasn't necessarily an intent originally just the more we learned kind of an interesting aspect to the work CSA2D7 Did you do a test run without tokens before the launch of the DX terminal simulation? poof it's all without tokens, so they're all simulated no tokeenennns NO TOKENS haha CSA2D7 So you did do a test run? poof but I mean the main thing you learn doing this work and we actually went way deeper than we should, we partnered with Dune and now have the full history of all Solana memecoin transactions for example tons and tons -- test runs are the only way to do it you find you have to run it to do the analysis and really get what's going on CSA2D7 The PFP tokens don't act as the agents? poof they do, I just meant, they are trading in a simulation of crypto -- there aren't real ERC20 tokens or anything involved although they have their fake uniswap v2 pools and stuff they interact with and can create coins etc CSA2D7 What is the most surprising thing you've seen so far from the test runs? gremplin the agi poof hmmm bunch of good ones the AGI is very good at figuring out making derivative coins $COIN becomes $COIN2 then becomes $COIN3 and also scamming each other with the classic $CO|N, $CO1N they'll really try to get each other in all the typical crypto ways... unprompted too, it's not something we specifically say "go scam people" -- especially in our test environment where we aren't able to have all the random player interaction that will normally happen when it's really running CSA2D7 And that's because derivatives and scamming fits in with the goal of efficient crypto trading in the simulation? poof yeah I think it's a pattern that exists right -- and then naturally they're going to try it out. every DOGE has its SHIB or whatever CSA2D7 How do you think random player interaction might affect the simulation? poof I think we see it as... especially for a big simulation... a kind of "spice" or "anti slop" measure almost there's obviously just it being fun and wanting to explore how people can interact with these systems in new ways (or in this case... in kind of a way that's familiar to maybe Sims or Dwarf Fortress or what have you but different) but there's a real pragmatic part to it where... having some level of interaction helps kick the AI out of just looping into slop mode or getting stuck on just repeating the same things it doesn't take much to keep it more engaging is what we and others have found CSA2D7 Are there ways to play the game that don't involve efficient trading or is that the primary and/or only goal? poof there are a few things -- its kind of a traditional... player segmentation type of thing -- we want to offer something for all of the types gremplin whats the four quadrant dork chart again poof so for the pk type personalities... there will be ways to mess with others -- you can think about it as prompt hijacking or helping produce fud type of thing. [Editor’s note: Poof uploads a “four quadrant dork chart” or the “Bartle Test” showing the taxonomy of player types in multiplayer video games - killers, achievers, socializers, and explorers] something like this, or this is it CSA2D7 Haha that's great poof the bartle taxonomy of player types I think explorers and socializers a lot of it is just inherently very social... one advantage of AI is its easy to make things jump out of the page and onto the real timeline etc... and it runs on its own so you also can just kind of watch it or like go enjoy just seeing whats going on and then there's the traditional I want the most money "winning" but we suspect many will be killers hahaha CSA2D7 How much of the simulation is in the player's control? [Editor’s note: There is a pause in the conversation as multiple screennames are shown typing] patttttiiiiii this is a spectacular question. I don't know the answer to this so will now wait for the answer from poof poof haha,i was waiting for gremplin's answer gremplin there's no grand incentive to truly win, as there is no prize, so people are free to be at home in their bartle quadrant (also im guessing at that and will also wait (ah shit dont wait on me im typing a whole different thing)) patttttiiiiii am I the only one that doesn't know? poof ahaha gremplin um how much is in their control poof well it's relative gremplin its like, yes, relative poof like it's funny gremplin there is a pager i can tell you that much poof we say "it's like you're a boss giving orders" and it's not deep orders its just like go do this and they'll just follow them indefinitely. You can prompt to them essentially whatever they want and they will go execute it so there's varying levels. i am a chill boss so i might be like “hey dont worry man just go have fun out there” and watch them patttttiiiiii who among us hasn't told their boss to eff off at one point or another? poof (i'm joking) but whether they actually follow it… that's up to them Lmao, yeah CSA2D7 On the game of chance / game of skill spectrum, is that the right framework? Or is there something new because of the will (I guess) of the agents? gremplin conmans game of life CSA2D7 Yea! I wanted to link this to conway etc. and termites (Material Protocol Arts , Paul Seidler); Zero player games poof yeah it's really hard -- it's emergent and no one has done this so all we know is that they reliably do seem to do the right kinds of things you would expect in crypto yeah it has that aspect to it -- or can be interepreted this way for sure i guess the different in terms of how i think about it is or maybe it's just an exaggeration of this frame but it's something where you're kind of doing this immense work on this experimental black box -- so the simulation side of it and how you think about it... it's a lot of like... physical, mental, but also like monetary / real compute type of energy behind it so its not something you just kind of run in the background or like let run for a long period of time -- its almost reverse of the durational way that like matto's work for example works CSA2D7 But Mitch Resnick's termite and Conway is about complexity emerging from extremely simple rules... and this is different? or do you see the agentic AI as different? poof yeah it's the opposite basically CSA2D7 Yes poof but similar -- that's actually why on dxrg. ai we use that conways game of life type of aesthetic throughout CSA2D7 Beautiful poof I think there's something though the more time you spend doing both foundational work and not on AI you kind of realize it's almost grimy it's actually something I've grown to love; you don't have a clean equation; it's not a simple beautiful thing you've got a bunch of weird parts that have been adapted to what seems to work and reliably gets results and then you have to go try out pushing it in different directions and trial / erroring knob pushes / different strategies etc and you can also wake up the next day and (its less extreme than this now) all of the sudden there's just a way different way to do the whole thing that's just straight superior so it's a much weirder thing -- because AI is fundamentally about: i've got a ton of data and i can highly efficiently shove a giant wave of compute at it and get some kind of helpful monkey typewriter situation just through brute force this is my unpopular not "cool" vision of AI CSA2D7 I think its very cool poof haha but it feels very true to what the experience of working in it is CSA2D7 That's great. I'm very excited to try this out. When does the simulation start? And when does minting end? poof minting runs through 5/15 at noon, wanted to give people time to not have to stress out too much about rushing into grabbing agents. and then the game will start basically an hour after -- and run for a full week taking from black monday 1987 to Y2K CSA2D7 Your projects have a decidedly finite duration - is this for a practical reason or do you have some sort of underlying reason? poof everything we do is something that... literally does not scale so we're usually pushing at the frontier of what is possible from a cost / practical standpoint now in the future... we know the curve is such that things will get cheaper etc -- but a lot of this is about looking into that future where.. you could actually run these fully fleshed out agents potentially just for a more normal game or user scenario and have it run for a month etc CSA2D7 Makes sense gremplin the 2027 PS6 Terminal Remake will take shmewies on a year long journey for just pennies a day. you cant have dead air, im going to fill it CSA2D7 Grand theft auto 6 looks ridiculous poof i love it CSA2D7 Honestly I think this is a great spot to wrap up! Great chat all, thanks for sitting on the bench with me poof this was great CSA and thanks for your patience through my network challenges gremplin we didnt even get to the cypherpunk ethos behind shmewies being cc0 thanks for the chat ~ poof True. They are cc0 on recommendation of XCOPY CSA2D7 Haha. Gremplin Im gonna fight you bro. Watch your DMs gremplin Yesss poof Careful, you'll end up friends patttttiiiiii thank you so much @CSA2D7 for hosting poof thanks again really great -- very good questions CSA2D7 Thank you for organizing! patttttiiiiii and again thanks to lonli for vibing with the music xo