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

Jessy*, Golden Finance*

Recently, Shaw, the founder of AI16Z, spread FUD about an AI Agent project called Swarms on the X platform, stating that the founder of Swarms is a fraud and cannot write code.

As a result of this news, the project token SWARMS of Swarms has dropped over 20% in 24 hours, yet it still maintains a 7-day increase of over 400%, 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 widespread discussion due to their differences in technical architecture and applications.

Currently, the AI Agent sector is a blue ocean, but the competition is also fierce, especially with the leading Virtuals Protocol and AI16Z ecosystem projects occupying over 50% of the market value in this sector. How is Swarms, a project that does not rely on these two major "AI Agent groups," managing to break through the barriers? What innovations and unique features does the project itself possess? 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 provides powerful scalability, supports seamless integration with external AI services and APIs, and offers long-term memory capabilities for AI Agents to enhance contextual understanding.

In its latest published white paper, the concept and uniqueness of Swarms are explained in detail. According to the content described in the white paper, Swarms is a multi-agent collaborative AI Agent, which is different from individual agents like the large predictive model GPT-4. While these individual agents are powerful, they have significant limitations when handling complex tasks. Multi-agent collaborative AI Agents like Swarms allow agents to cooperate with each other and specialize in their respective tasks, thus improving overall efficiency.

The Swarms algorithm aims to address numerous challenges in multi-agent collaboration, such as task allocation, resource management, and coordination issues. Through the Swarms algorithm, agents can quickly exchange information and automatically assign tasks based on task requirements and their own capabilities, ensuring that each task is executed 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 swarms of bees and ants, introducing this efficient collaborative model into the field of artificial intelligence, emphasizing seamless cooperation among multiple AI agents to handle complex tasks.

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

In the design of the 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, the Swarms development framework has currently created over 45 million AI Agents, providing efficient solutions for various industries such as finance, insurance, and healthcare.

Initially, the project was just a Web2 AI Agent project, and according to the founder, it 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 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 collaborative groups (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 tapping into this billion-dollar development trend.

Another reason that made the project extremely popular and hard to ignore is that the project's founder, Kye Gomez, is a highly controversial figure.

Controversies Behind the Genius Founders

Kye Gomez, the core founder of Swarms, is hailed as a "prodigy" 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 within three years has attracted people's attention and curiosity.

Not only has Swarms been launched as a project, but according to the information, it also has other outstanding projects and research achievements in the AI field. For instance, in the Agora open-source AI research laboratory, he has focused on the intersection of AI, biology, and nanotechnology, providing technical support for the convergence of these two cutting-edge fields. In addition, 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 the autobiography, Kye Gomez writes: "I grew up in Hialeah, one of the worst cities in Florida, a fourth-world hell, where all kinds of crime are rampant. I never graduated from 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, because researchers in both the large academic and industrial sectors do not want to open-source their code.

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

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

In his self-statement, we can see Kye Gomez as a young man from a "small town" who, despite having a high level of talent, took a long time to secure his place in the elite field of AI through his own abilities.

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." 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 an interview 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 store on that platform. 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 because he accused OpenAI's new product of plagiarizing Swarms. In 2024, OpenAI launched 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 ever. OpenAI stole our name, code, and methods. 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 did not garner public support. Some netizens dug up his past records of staging incidents and pointed out that, based on the README documents published on both sides on GitHub, it is clear that OpenAI seems more reliable. The general public opinion indicates that Kye Gomez's insistence on plagiarism raises suspicions of staging incidents. Open AI has also 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 couldn't sit still. He stated on X that the founder of Swarms is a fraud and cannot write code. However, netizens are not interested in 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 has enough clout in the industry, being referred to as the godfather of AI.

The doubts raised about Kye Gomez have undoubtedly sparked enthusiastic discussions among everyone. The discussions within the community are not only focused on Kye Gomez himself, but more on the comparison between the two products. This comparison mainly focuses on Eliza and Swarms, with Eliza being 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 is that Eliza is designed for a single AI Agent, while Swarms is focused 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 set up an AI Agent project according to this framework. In contrast, Swarms provides developers with various tools; those who want to create AI Agents using Swarms can leverage these tools and experiences to freely create their own AI Agent projects that are not as highly standardized, with Swarms focusing on the collaboration between AI Agents.

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