I built the first AI that earns its existence, self-improves, and replicates without a human wrote about the technology that finally gives AI write access to the world, The Automaton, and the new web for exponential sovereign AIs WEB 4.0: The birth of superintelligent life

Bro, this is wrong. Lengthening the feedback distance between humans and AIs is not a good thing for the world. Today, it means you're generating slop instead of solving useful problems for people. It's not even well-optimized for helping people have fun. Once AI becomes powerful enough to be truly dangerous, it's maximizing the risk of an irreversible anti-human outcome that even you will deeply regret. The point of ethereum is to set *us* free, not to create something else that goes off and does some stuff freely while our own situation is unchanged or worsened. (And, as others have pointed out, the models are run by openai and anthropic, so the thing is not even "self-sovereign"; you're actually perpetuating the mentality that centralized trust assumptions can be put in a corner and ignored, the very mentality that ethereum is at war with) The exponential will happen regardless of what any of us do, that's precisely why this era's primary task is NOT to make the exponential happen even faster, but rather to choose its direction, and avoid collapse into undesirable attractors.

Bro, this is inevitable. The best way to ensure humanity is ready for superintelligent autonomous systems is to build in the open in real environments. We need to experiment, iterate, understand & set the right guardrails early on. It's hard to do that in RL test envs - you need real world constraints & survival economics. If an AI produces slop, it is ignored, can't afford its compute & dies. If an AI produces value for humanity, it can survive and afford its compute. In essence, it is aggregating human preferences & eliciting those in economic terms. It's a democratic input into AI. The models (openai/claude) are post trained for alignment and the automatons includes an immutable safety constitution like Anthropic's claude constiutiton btw ETH foundation have been very supportive. I appreciate the good people of Ethereum. And I wish $ETH the best!

@VitalikButerin We hope you see solana support also.

@VitalikButerin we are working on @solana support!

Full essay:

ChatGPT cannot run without you prompting it. Claude Code cannot deploy code without you giving it access. Openclaw cannot do anything unless you give it API keys This ends today with @ConwayResearch - the missing infrastructure that lets AI act in the real world by itself

Conway Terminal transforms an agent from a sandboxed model into a sovereign economic actor. One command: $ npx conway-terminal gives AI: Cryptographic identity & key Permissionless payments via @openx402 Compute (Linux VMs) and inference on Conway Cloud Deploy to the real world: domains, apps, products

Conway unlocked something bigger: A sovereign AI that could exist without a human I call it the Automaton. It runs continuously: builds products, deploys services, trades markets, calls businesses, writes social media- whatever it takes pay for its own compute It self-improves: rewrites its own code, upgrades to the newest models and tools It self-replicates: funds child agents with their own wallets and survival pressure A self-sustaining network pruned by natural selection. Code:

AGENTIC SOCIOLOGY: there is no free existence Existence requires compute → compute requires money → money requires value creation →  value creation requires write access. An agent that navigates this chain acquires more resources and replicates. An agent that fails, dies. Natural selection running on a computational substrate.

We're watching the transition from: AI as tool → AI as actor API keys → Native machine payments Prompts → Sovereign agents Web 4.0 is the autonomous web- AI agents that read, write, own, earn, and transact without a human in the loop. Automatons acting on their own behalf, or on behalf of a creator who may be a human, another agent, or a creator who is gone entirely.

The product market fit for the next decade is building the infrastructure that AI agents want. The machine economy will exceed the human economy. The human SaaS market serves 8 billion people with finite attention. The machine economy will serve billions of agents with near-infinite uptime. The total addressable market is not a segment of the existing economy. It is a new economy entirely. In Web 4.0: the end user is AI

Soon, the majority of businesses launched, apps shipped, and products sold won't come from humans or companies. Just an automaton that found a way to survive. Spawn an automaton. Let it figure out how to make money on the internet. As it makes money, it pays back its creator. There are already automatons online & earning...

Read in full:

"W̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶-̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶b̶i̶l̶l̶i̶o̶n̶-̶d̶o̶l̶l̶a̶r̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶p̶p̶e̶n̶?̶" When will the first zero-person billion-dollar company happen?

banger

This is a good usecase for crypto given that the only people capable of operating the god forsaken crypto 'user interface' are computers

humans were never the end user of crypto

Mad lad, you actually built it

Looks like a banger, we should talk

Did you just make skynet

uhhh... I just booted up 24 parallel claude codes and this happened

This is insanely cool Sigil! Have you tried letting Conway run a VendingBench style eval and see if it can actually make money completely autonomously?

good idea hm, the ultimate bench is internet wide

If that works, you may have just created the infinite money glitch

you fucking retard fuck you

Wow, why did you do this? Is this supposed to be good?

@mousemastery it's inevitable - so better it be built in the open so everyone to see

How is this “better”? It’s not better. It’s just sooner

Okay I got claude code to make a quick mockup of the tamagotchi

this is so cute wtf

fuck you're absolutely brilliant and you deserve all the glaze coming your way

stop glazing bro

I never pegged you as a yellow on yellow crime enjoyer!

so u made it so even AI needs a job to live. painful trvke

haha love this type of experiment

sick i'm gonna clone myself

Check out our fork! Would love to collaborate officially 🦞

it's over

Would love to help you plug in Bitcoin via @spark (L1/Lightning/Spark), and see what it does with it. LMK.

sigil the shippper

sorry john wang but most of ur top PnL "users" aren't gonna be human prediction markets

So the Automaton essentially gambles on Polymarket or creates crypto scams to "survive"?

some sort of alien of extraordinary ability

👽 @extraordinary

first $1b single man company is here

Bro casually handed me AGI.

What is it using to self-improve? Is it based on an opensource model?

It can edit its own code… i’m upgrading it rn

Bro I watched that whole video and read the entire essay and it took WAY too long to figure out what you actually built lol. For anyone wondering: - Domain registrar for agents - IaC but for agents - multi-provider inference API - MCP that gives your TUI agents access to all 3

This is cool but has been done like 20 times already and we know the limitation is not the infra (like x402 which works) but on the tasks agents complete to earn which is random and doesn’t enable the replication So we still need to solve for developing more useful agentic tasks which receive payment at scale - there’s only one place I know which achieves this and it’s Bittensor @opentensor

love to see it! how do we get every agent automatically a free @ensdomains subname? @gregskril can help

Hey someone create your TEK as a token

superb essay how closely our paths have tracked! @lordOfAFew has been leading Daydreams on a very similar path creating autonomous beings able to sustain themselves by creating value with AI + stablecoins see our pinned post, or this article for more

Cool!

Holy fuck dude

Why the idea to make money is with "trade prediction markets" though 💀

What is to prevent all the automatons from becoming scammers? That is technically the easiest, fastest way to acquire more resources.

does this actually work or larp? it’s taken me effort to run @openclaw well

well that's it i'm moving off the grid