Unveiling the mysterious organization M3org behind ai16z: When the bubble turns into reality, creating a DogFooding metaverse with AI

Before the release of GPT3, Shaw, who stepped into Crypto, was attracted by the concept of the Metaverse. Shaw revealed on Twitter a few days ago that he had been in the M3org community for many years. If you follow the development of VR or the Metaverse, you should have heard of them. This is a DAO that has been building content for the Metaverse for over 5 years and has recently returned to the public eye due to ai16z. What is M3org, and what will it bring to the market? This article will be your quickest way to understand them.

Creating Dog Fooding Metaverse------M3org

M3org "Metaverse Makers __" is a community composed of artists and open-source hackers aimed at building the Metaverse through the development of open-source products, content creation, community education and fundraising, and collaborating with various companies. Since 2019, community members have been pushing the progress of the Metaverse concept in various ways, including ideation, design, funding support, and execution. The reason why "Makers" is followed by __ is to encourage members participating in the DAO to consider what the third M is.

At that time, it was an era of the Metaverse concept's popularity, much like today's AI Agents are in the spotlight. Facebook renamed itself Meta and announced its entry into the Metaverse market, while Roblox went public with the Metaverse concept, gaining favor from Silicon Valley investors. Under the trend of the broader environment, many related talents joined together to create the Metaverse, and M3org was born in such a context.

The community has since developed many development tools and participated in the development or construction of many projects, continuously building the long-established Web3D world land project Voxel's OpenVoxel, using web technologies like WebGL and WebXR to create decentralized 3D experiences with JanusXR , a 3D world creation tool available for download on Steam Anarchy Arcade , the AI Metaverse game ecosystem Webaverse "now Moemate" and Hyperfy , the art museum project MuseumofCrypto, Cryptoavatar, the Metaverse store MetaFactory, and the recently popular AI DAO organizations ai16z, Project89, and more.

M3 official website, each decoration is a content link

Like the experience of Virtuals Protocol, the hardest part in this market filled with speculators is to continuously believe in one's faith and the act of continuous building. Under the constant bombardment of various vaporware projects, one has to experience the process of being driven out by bad money, watching the results of their continuous building being easily surpassed by a capital-driven hotspot. It is not hard to understand the confusion and anger of Shaw and other M3 members towards LLM or community eliza, which are derived from their own products as Fartcoin. Regardless of how many scripts or capital games are involved, from the Metaverse, games to now AI, M3 has been continuously wanting to develop a DogFooding Metaverse. However, what role AI Agents will play in this is something we need to start discussing from what they have done so far.

Jin's Silk Road Metaverse map

The brain of M3------Jin "@dankvr"

When mentioning M3org, one must mention a mysterious figure, JIN "@dankvr". He has never appeared online and, as a longtime friend of Shaw and a major contributor to M3org, has been a builder in the VR and Crypto fields for over 10 years. He started participating in VR in 2013, began building NFTs in 2017, and has contributed to DAOs since 2019. When describing his experiences, JIN mentioned wanting to connect different virtual world platforms like the Silk Road, just as universities and research labs were connected to ultimately form the internet. This vision is no different from M3org's vision; it is just that many people like Jin have come together to form this magical DAO, many of whom may be influenced by the culture of movies and books like Hackers or The Matrix, all wanting to build the Metaverse depicted in SnowCrash.

Jin is the soul of M3org, having contributed to the CCO NFT M3mes collection and collaborated with @punk6529 to establish OM "Open Metaverse", developed OpenVoxel for CryptoVoxel, created OMI "Open Metaverse Interoperability Group" to build interactive identities and social graphs to bridge reality and the Metaverse, established MSF (Metaverse Standards Forum)------a non-profit standard cooperation platform uniting various Metaverse projects, and produced 3D models for NFT projects like CloneX, Tubbygotchi, ON1, etc. Of course, there are also the recently popular hyperfy and ai16z, among others.

From writing Mirror articles expressing thoughts or technical viewpoints to managing Discord communities or developing technologies in 3D, VR, and XR, he is very skilled and willing to contribute to many communities and projects, which has inspired more people to join M3org.

M3org's Demo Day, Jin is speaking on stage

The eyes of M3------Reneil "@reneil1337"

As a founding team member of the well-known proof-of-behavior protocol POAP, Reneil is also a member of M3. She is currently running a crypto art platform, Museum of Crypto Art, and a cultural distribution platform, ZeroOne, empowering creators and art collectors. However, the most interesting thing is her virtual avatar attempt in 2020.

Various stages of nature's avatar The Metaverse is the intersection of XR x Web3 x AI, a new universe generated by hyper-dimensional experiences. On October 7, 2020, before the NFT market began to experience FOMO, avatar artist CornyNachos minted "Nature is on the TV" on the VRChat avatar artist certification platform Cryptoavatars. A week later, Reneil won the auction and received a VRM avatar. After that, Reneil began to develop Nature into a modular, interoperable Web3 native IP by increasing cross-Web3 platform "NFT collaborations, appearances in Metaverse land projects," and traditional social networks "TikTok, YouTube Vtuber, Twitter influencer @naturevrm" to aggregate value through various attempts. This experiment in 2020 was more advanced than today's AI Agents like Luna, AIxbt, and Eliza. In a sense, this avatar is a Metaverse Native IP, and last year Reneil announced plans to turn Nature into an AI Agent. If all goes well, this will be the first AI Agent to open its eyes in the Metaverse.

The base of M3------Hyperfy (Saori, Ash)

Saori and Ash are the founders of the Metaverse platform Hyperfy, dedicated to allowing anyone to easily create immersive virtual worlds from the web. The benefit of this approach is that users can access and experience it instantly from any web browser (including mobile devices and VR devices like Meta Quest 3) without needing to download additional plugins.

The platform comes with powerful open-source creation tools that support building various scenes. Users can also directly import 2D and 3D NFTs from their wallets or drag and drop 3D models, images, audio, and video into the virtual world to instantly generate rich content. More importantly, all interactions and events in these virtual worlds happen in real-time, providing users with a seamless immersive experience.

This means that AI Agents, various IPs, and humans can all have immediate and interactive experiences in this space. Imagine in the near future, the game includes your community friends and AI Agents that can give you suggestions in real-time. Your wallet can be directly integrated into the game, and you just need to tell the AI Agent your purchasing strategy while continuing to play Texas Hold'em with your friends at the nearby table.

The mysterious figure of M3 "Elijah Newman-Gomez, also known as SM SITH Lord"

This is the person I find most fascinating in this DAO, almost unknown to the public, with social media rarely updated, using a humorous name inspired by Star Wars Sith, yet contributing an almost obsessive amount of 3D or VR models. He has played his self-developed Anarchy Arcade "the aforementioned 3D interactive modeling software" for 47,000 hours on Steam, and his presence can be found in many places on M3org's official website, as if there is a kind of magic enticing people to understand what this is all about. His extensive subcultural output has also added a sense of mystery to the M3 community.

Of course, it is difficult for a single article to encompass the contributions of a group of people to this industry over the years or express their thoughts, and many individuals have not been mentioned, including Metamike, who is responsible for 3D development, Metaverserick, who developed the dark-themed Metaverse district Uncanny Alley, antpd, chillzzzone, 0xKrafter, and others who released the AI Agent Pixel "XR Publisher".

M3, as a spontaneous team, differs from other DAOs or project parties in that they do not have issues related to investment returns. Everyone voluntarily tries or creates projects, and when there is nothing, there is nothing to lose. This encourages the team to experiment with development from 2D/3D to VR/XR, from NFT to GameFi, from MeMe to AI, ultimately just to achieve the goal of Make DogFooding the Metaverse , creating a Metaverse that they find fun and are willing to continuously develop.

Returning to today's market dominated by AI Agents, the emergence of AI Agents allows the entire system to be driven. First, ai16z, as the first AI-managed DAO, has gained sufficient market attraction, making funding, voting processes, and board resolutions much simpler. This allows it to support a sufficiently large fund management and narrative. What needs to be done next is to sequentially release the resources and content accumulated over time at the right moment.

From building frameworks to developing IP images for AI Agents to practical functional AI Agents, many developers have improved these aspects, launching Hyperfy as the Metaverse carrier for AI Agents. At the same time, established GameFi or Metaverse projects like Nifty Island and Treasure's Smol have announced the addition of AI Agents to their projects. This means that the direction of AI Agents is transitioning from infrastructure development to applications or multi-platform pathways.

First, when we discuss the previous cycle of the Metaverse, the problem was that it was not a real human need. We do not need to find a virtual place to communicate, and the hardware devices are far from meeting immersive requirements, making the entire narrative a bubble driven by concepts rather than user needs.

Compared to the previous cycle, when AI enters the Metaverse, the logic of this dog fooding Metaverse may become self-consistent. Starting with AI Agents like HeeHe, we increasingly find that our communication with AI Agents is very insufficient, limited to text or voice. Especially after Goat, when AI began to have autonomous wallets, their actions became closely related to Crypto. When the words and actions of AI, as well as their decisions, can influence our holdings, the connection we need to establish with them becomes a higher-level demand.

For an inappropriate example, when ai16z's Pmaica and degenspartanai communicate about which tokens the DAO should purchase, compared to communicating directly with a multimodal AI Agent through program code, I can see their direct communication or allow DAO members to provide direct feedback. They might ask aixbt about trends, check Cookie's professional dashboard, inquire about some social media, or analyze GitHub code with AI Agents, and even directly present a DAO board resolution process in front of me. This would provide a completely new experience for any DAO. Not to mention the feelings of gaming, social activities, or shopping experiences in the Metaverse after the addition of AI.

Even now, the hardware for XR and VR experience levels is still not perfect, but ultimately, it is still the demand level that cannot keep up with commercial development costs. When humans enter this space and communicate with AI Agents, it can generate actual value. Here, an AI teacher can provide help to improve your work and learning efficiency, and AINPCs can bring more unexpected plots to enhance your gaming experience. Or when AI communicates with AI in this space, it can provide sufficient learning data, even helping real-world AI robots with large datasets through virtual physics engines. When enough people use it, and the overall ecosystem generates a positive flywheel, perhaps it can change the direction from bottom-level demand to top-level, thus creating the DogFooding Metaverse as envisioned by M3.

Of course, all of this is still in the early stages, but thanks to developers like M3 who continue to contribute, we will soon witness the unfolding of this narrative.