Swarms vs AI16Z Founder Fud, who is the future of AI Agents?

Jessy*, Golden Finance*

Recently, AI16Z founder Shaw launched Fud against an AI Agent project called Swarms on the X platform. He stated on the X platform that the founder of Swarms is a scammer and cannot write code.

Affected by this news, the project token SWARMS of Swarms has fallen by more than 20% in 24 hours, but it still maintains a 400% increase over the past 7 days, with a current market capitalization of nearly 300 million dollars.

Apart from the positive confrontation from the founder of AI16Z that has sparked quite a public uproar, there has been ongoing controversy between Swarms and AI16Z on Twitter during this time, and their differences in technology architecture and applications have also led to widespread discussion.

Currently, the AI Agent track is a blue ocean, but the competition is also very fierce, especially with leading projects like Virtuals Protocol and AI16Z occupying over 50% of the market value in this field. How did Swarms manage to break through as a project that does not rely on these two major "AI Agent groups"? What innovations and unique features does the project itself have? And is its founder Kye Gomez really the fraud that Shaw claims, someone 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 like a team through intelligent orchestration and efficient cooperation, addressing complex business operation needs. This framework offers powerful scalability, supports seamless integration with external AI services and APIs, while providing AI Agents with long-term memory capabilities to enhance contextual understanding.

In its latest published white paper, it elaborates on the concept of Swarms and its uniqueness. According to the content of its white paper, Swarms is a multi-agent collaborative AI Agent, which is different from individual agents like the large predictive model GPT-4. Although these 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 collaborate with each other and specialize in their respective tasks, thus 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. Through the Swarms algorithm, agents can quickly exchange information, automatically allocate tasks based on task requirements and their own abilities, ensuring that each task is executed by the most suitable agent.

It is evident that the core philosophy of its operation draws inspiration from collective intelligence systems found in nature, such as bee colonies 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. 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 SWARMS coin serves as the universal currency of the agent economy, playing an irreplaceable role in facilitating agent transactions and incentivizing agents to participate 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 launched its token on December 18, 2024, which means that at this moment, the project officially transitions from Web2 to Web3.

The project currently enjoys a high level of community engagement among numerous AI Agents, thanks to its product philosophy and innovation. At present, industry insiders generally believe that the next stage for AI Agents is group 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 expertise to perform better in specific tasks and scenarios. And Swarms is in line with this billion-dollar development trend.

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

Controversies Behind Genius Founders

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

Not only has he launched the Swarms project, but according to available information, he also has other excellent projects and research achievements in the AI field. For instance, in the Agora open-source AI research lab, he focuses on the intersection of AI with biology and nanotechnology, providing technical support for the convergence of these two cutting-edge fields. Additionally, he developed Pegasus, a project focused on natural language processing and embedding models; at the same time, he participated in the open-source implementation of AlphaFold3, providing tool support for research in the field of biology.

In his statement, Kye Gomez wrote: "I grew up in Hialeah, one of the worst cities in Florida, a fourth-world hell where crime is 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, allowing me to implement research papers without code, as researchers in both the large academic and industrial fields are reluctant to open source their code.

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

Since last year, I have implemented hundreds of models for research papers for free, without any return other than the endless verbal harassment from the elites and their rulers.

In his autobiography, we can see Kye Gomez as a young man from a "small town". Although he has a high level of talent, he spent a long time using his abilities to secure a place for himself in the elite-filled field of AI.

This passage may explain why Swarms has been deeply involved in Web2 but recently shifted to Web3. Web3 better allows it to achieve "monetization of talent." It has proven to be the right choice, as Swarms has emerged, and its current market value has reached 300 million USD.

In media reports, Kye Gomez started learning programming at the age of 10 and applied his newly acquired programming knowledge to games, which ultimately led Gomez 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 also developed a Slack-based AI assistant through APAC AI.

Kye Gomez's initial rise to fame was not due to the products he released, but rather his criticism of Open AI's new product for copying Swarms. In 2024, OpenAI released an open-source product — the Swarm framework, designed for building, orchestrating, and deploying multi-agent systems. Upon seeing this product, Kye Gomez stated, "The Swarms framework is the first production-level multi-agent orchestration framework in history. OpenAI stole our name, code, and methodology. Everything, from the syntax of the agent structure to the Swarm class objects, comes from our codebase."

Kye Gomez publicly questioned Open AI's theft, but this did not garner public support for him. Some netizens dug up his history of making false claims and pointed out that from 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 making false claims. Open AI has also not responded to Kye Gomez's plagiarism allegations.

The Entanglement of Swarms and AI16Z

Faced with the rapidly growing project Swarms, AI16Z's founder Shaw couldn't sit still. He stated on X that the founder of Swarms is a fraud and cannot write code. However, netizens are not impressed by Shaw's remarks, and are more inclined to tell Shaw to "mind his own business."

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

The questioning of Kye Gomez has 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 on Eliza and Swarms. Eliza is an open-source modular architecture developed by Shaw, primarily used to create 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 their differences for developers in simpler terms, Eliza is a development framework for a single AI Agent, allowing developers to quickly build an AI Agent project according to this framework. In contrast, Swarms provides developers with various tools; those who wish to create AI Agents using Swarms can leverage these tools and experiences to freely innovate their own, less standardized AI Agent projects. Swarms is focused on the 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.