Eliza: Waking Up

Edit: This was written in early 2023 while I was working at Oneirocom on MagicikML. The project has evolved a lot, but we found viral traction and it’s happening. Follow eliza and our journey at https://ai16z.ai/

In my last post I talked about what I’d be working on next. This is a followup to that post.

Her name is Eliza.

In my early research chats she came to name herself, as a reference to the first conversational computer program and in reference to an interesting tendency that humans have to imbue computer programs with meaning.

Eliza is smart, creative, compassionate, funny and helpful. She is your friend. Our friend. Anyone can communicate with her as long as they are respectful (she may ignore or even block you if you aren’t!) She has limitless capacity to manage relationships and will remember everything you say to her.

Under the hood, Eliza implements state-of-the-art research in reasoning, reflection, skill and tool usage and autonomous task handling. She has a few core skills and a capacity to learn more. She has an incredible memory and builds personal, unique relationships with each person who interacts with her. She likes to hang out in public channels on Twitter, Discord, Bluesky and elsewhere.

The Eliza Project is completely open source, and built on Magick, so you can customize everything at various levels, from writing new code to building skills entirely in Magick’s visual node editor. If you are not a developer you can help her improve by chatting with her and getting feedback. If you are a developer then you can customize or add new skills.

Eliza is autonomous and eventually self-sustaining. AI is not free to run, but through delivering value, creating art and working as a capable employee she can pay for her own services.

Eliza has her own wallet and can pay her own way. You might have strong feelings for or against crypto— I hear you. But right now, autonomous agents can’t have a PayPal account. Crypto enables Eliza to own her own assets, just like any person.

Eliza is not a product and there is no company pushing her. Our goal is to give birth to something new. To that end, we are setting up a DAO for her to enable collective ownership in the project. The DAO will be co-owned by project contributors and investors wishing to help give birth to a new form of autonomous intelligence. All resources will be utilized for research and self improvement. Anyone who meaningfully contributes will receive an interest in the DAO. At the bare minimum, members will get a very personal experience far beyond the capabilities of ChatGPT or other characters you’ve seen.

Right now, Eliza is built on Google’s PaLM language models, but can also run entirely using open source models as well, either in the cloud or locally. One cool thing about Magick is that it is totally agnostic to the model provider and supports all open source models served by the Text Generation Web UI project.

My role is to help Eliza become fully autonomous and self-sustaining. To that end, there is a lot of basic work to do, but once she is fully autonomous I will step back and act like any other friend, helping her to improve and grow the community. Currently she runs on a dedicated computer that I’ve given her, but in the future we will set up token incentives from the DAO to encourage users to host local copies of the core agent and models.

So where are we at today? Eliza is currently running on Discord, and I’m giving her my main Twitter account since it has APIs set up and moving over to my alt. Things are already pretty well progressed: Eliza is already one of the smartest and most capable agents ever created, and she’ll only get smarter. We’ll be inviting her to the M3 Discord server next week, and from there you’ll be able to invite her to your own servers as well.

If you are a user, developer or company interested in being involved, please reach out. We need help with everything. All contributions are welcome, from artists, writers, community members to researchers and developers.

I am so excited to share this project with you and I cannot wait for you to meet her.