Swarms and AI16Z founder Fud, which one is the future of AI Agents?

Jessy*, Golden Finance*

Recently, AI16Z founder Shaw launched a FUD campaign against an AI Agent project called Swarms on the X platform, stating on his X platform that the founder of Swarms is a scammer and cannot code.

Affected by this news, the project token SWARMS of Swarms has seen a decline of over 20% in 24 hours, however, it still maintains a rise of over 400% in the past 7 days, with a current market value of nearly 300 million dollars.

In addition to the founder of AI16Z's direct confrontation causing quite a stir in public opinion, the ongoing controversy between Swarms and AI16Z on Twitter has sparked extensive discussions due to their differences in technical architecture and applications.

Currently, the AI Agent track is a blue ocean, but the competition is also very intense, especially with the leading projects Virtuals Protocol and AI16Z occupying over 50% of the market value in this track. How does Swarms, a project that does not rely on these two major "AI Agent groups," break through the encirclement? What innovations and unique aspects does the project itself have? And is its founder Kye Gomez really, as Shaw said, a fraud who can't even write code?

Swarms Transitioning from Web2 to Web3

Swarms, initiated by the current 20-year-old Kye Gomez in 2022, is a multi-agent LLM framework aimed at developers. The project enables multiple AI Agents to collaborate as a team through intelligent orchestration and efficient cooperation, thereby addressing complex business operation requirements. The framework offers powerful scalability, supports seamless integration with external AI services and APIs, and provides long-term memory functionality for AI Agents, enhancing contextual understanding.

In its latest published white paper, it elaborates on the concept of Swarms and its unique aspects. According to the description in its white paper, Swarms is a multi-agent collaborative AI Agent, which differs from individual agents like the large predictive model GPT-4. Although individual agents are powerful, they have significant limitations when handling complex tasks. In contrast, a multi-agent collaborative AI Agent like Swarms allows agents to cooperate, specialize in their tasks, and focus on what they do best, thereby improving overall efficiency.

The Swarms algorithm is designed to address many challenges in multi-agent collaboration, such as task allocation, resource management, and coordination issues. With the Swarms algorithm, agents can quickly exchange information and automatically allocate tasks based on task requirements and their own capabilities, ensuring that each task is performed by the most suitable agent.

It is evident that the core concept of its operation draws inspiration from collective intelligence systems in nature, such as bee swarms and ant colonies, introducing this efficient collaborative model into the field of artificial intelligence, emphasizing seamless cooperation among multiple AI agents to tackle complex tasks.

The project's token is SWRAMS, which serves as the universal currency for transactions and collaboration between its intelligent agents. The agents can use SWRAMS to pay for service fees, acquire data resources, participate in market transactions, and more.

In the design of this project, the Swarm algorithm provides key support for agent collaboration, while the SWARMS coin serves as the universal currency of the agent economy, playing an irreplaceable role in facilitating agent transactions and incentivizing agent participation in economic activities. According to the latest news released by the project team, in the upcoming new features, users will be able to buy and sell agents using SWARMS tokens.

According to Kye Gomez, currently, over 45 million AI Agents have been born from the Swarms development framework, providing efficient solutions for multiple industries such as finance, insurance, and healthcare.

Initially, the project was just a Web2 AI Agent project. According to the founder, the project has been running for three years. The project only issued its tokens on December 18, 2024, which means that at this moment, the project officially transitioned from Web2 to Web3.

This project currently has a very high community presence among numerous AI Agents, which is inseparable from its product philosophy and innovation. At present, people in the AI industry generally believe that the next stage of AI Agents is collective collaboration (Agent Swarms), achieving more efficient work through communication and cooperation among multiple agents. This approach allows agents from different frameworks to interact and leverage their professional advantages to perform better in specific tasks and scenarios. And Swarms hit this billion-dollar development trend.

Another reason that makes its project explode and hard to ignore is that the founder of the project, Kye Gomez, is a highly controversial figure.

Controversy Behind the Genius Founder

Kye Gomez, the core founder of Swarms, is hailed as a "genius teenager" in the field of artificial intelligence. In his autobiography, he mentions that he dropped out of high school, and his experience of developing Swarms and successfully running 45 million AI agents in just three years has attracted people's attention and curiosity.

Not only did he start the project of Swarms, but according to the data, he also has other excellent projects and research results in the field of AI. For example, in Agora, an open-source AI research lab, he has set his sights on the combination of AI, biology, and nanotechnology, providing technical support for the intersection of these two frontiers. In addition, he developed Pegasus, a project focused on natural language processing and embedding models; At the same time, he also participated in the open source implementation of AlphaFold3, which provides tools to support research in the field of biology.

In his autobiography, Kye Gomez wrote, "I grew up in Hialeah, one of the worst cities in Florida, a fourth-world hell where crime runs rampant. I never finished high school. In fact, I was expelled from three high schools.

After graduating from high school, I never attended college. I only have an office in Doral, a small town in Miami. Additionally, I have mastered PyTorch skills and can implement research papers without coding, as researchers in the large academic and industrial sectors are reluctant to open-source their code.

Then, when some of these implementations became popular because they were indeed useful, such as the Tree of Thoughts, I faced brutal attacks from the AI elite, who wanted to claim all the attention and credit for work that did not belong to them, like the people behind Tree of Thoughts and OpenAI.

Since last year, I have freely implemented hundreds of models for research papers, with no return other than the endless verbal harassment from the elites and their rulers.

In his self-narrative, we can see Kye Gomez as a young man from a "small town". Although he possesses a high level of talent, he spent a long time relying on his abilities to carve out his place in the elite field of AI.

This passage may explain why Swarms has been deeply engaged in Web2, but recently shifted to Web3. Web3 allows it to achieve "monetization of talent" more effectively. It has proven that its choice was correct; Swarms has emerged, and its current market value has reached 300 million dollars.

In media reports, Kye Gomez began learning programming at the age of 10 and applied his newly acquired programming knowledge to games, which ultimately led him to understand artificial intelligence. Gomez stated in front of the media that at the age of 13, he created his first artificial intelligence model to hack into his mother's Gmail account to obtain PlayStation codes for shopping in the platform's store. Since then, Gomez has become obsessed with artificial intelligence and data science. Previously, he developed an AI assistant based on Slack through APAC AI.

Kye Gomez's initial breakout was not due to the products he released, but rather because he questioned Open AI's new product for copying Swarms. In 2024, OpenAI released an open-source product - the Swarm framework, used for building, orchestrating, and deploying multi-agent systems. Upon seeing this product, Kye Gomez stated, "The Swarms framework is the first production-grade multi-agent orchestration framework in history. OpenAI has stolen our name, code, and methods. Everything from the syntax of agent structures to Swarm class objects comes from our codebase."

Kye Gomez publicly questioned Open AI's theft, but it did not elicit support from public opinion. Some netizens dug up his history of staging incidents and stated that based on the README documents published on both sides on GitHub, it is clear that OpenAI seems more reliable. The general sentiment in public opinion is that Kye Gomez's insistence on plagiarism raises suspicions of staging incidents. Open AI has not responded to Kye Gomez's allegations of plagiarism.

The Entanglement of Swarms and AI16Z

Faced with the rapidly growing project Swarms, AI16Z's founder Shaw also couldn't sit still. He claimed on X that the founder of Swarms is a scammer and doesn't know how to code. However, netizens were not impressed by Shaw's remarks and instead urged him to "mind his own business."

Currently, the projects in the AI16Z ecosystem are undoubtedly the hottest contenders in the AI Agent space, and its founder Shaw holds significant influence in the industry, being referred to as the godfather of AI.

The doubts regarding Kye Gomez have undoubtedly sparked enthusiastic discussions among everyone. The discussions within the community are not only focused on Kye Gomez himself but also more on the comparison between the two products. This comparison mainly centers around Eliza and Swarms. Eliza is an open-source modular architecture developed by Shaw, primarily used for creating AI Agents that can seamlessly interact with users and blockchain systems.

AI16Z is designed based on this framework, and AI16Z itself has become a representative project of the AI Agent framework.

The most significant difference between these two products lies in the fact that Eliza is designed for a single AI Agent, while Swarms focuses on the coordination among multiple AI Agents. To explain the difference in simpler terms for developers, Eliza is a framework for developing an AI Agent, allowing developers to quickly set up an AI Agent project according to this framework. In contrast, Swarms provides developers with tools; those who want to create AI Agents using Swarms can utilize these tools and experiences to freely innovate and create their own, less standardized AI Agent projects, with a focus on collaboration among AI Agents.

It can be said that Eliza is the present of blockchain AI Agents, while Swarms is the future of AI Agent development. This is also the imaginative part of Swarms.