Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu says agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important change in the internet since blockchain, and his company is backing this with a new $10 million investment program.
Important points:
- Animoca Brands launched a $10 million fund targeting early-stage agent AI, calling the space OpenAI circa 2020.
- Yat Siu says the $900 billion advertising industry will transition to AI agents and direct discovery value to blockchain networks.
- Mr. Siu predicts a 1,000x increase in productivity and advises retail investors to build a broad basket across 50 to 70 AI companies.
Yat Siu says AI will increase productivity by 1,000x, tells retail investors to build a wide basket now
Speaking at the David Lin Report in Miami with David Lin and Bonnie Blockchain, Siu described the current state of agent AI as comparable to seed-stage investments in OpenAI and Anthropic about five years ago. He instructed investors to act accordingly.
“AI’s productivity gains are literally 1,000x,” Siu says. “So we think the revenue profile will be a thousand-fold even among the top companies.”
Bet $10 million on the next web
Animoca Brands, which has more than 620 portfolio companies across gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), real-world assets, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has announced a fund targeting early-stage agent AI infrastructure. Siu said the company is treating this moment the same way it would treat gaming and NFTs in 2021.
“Getting into the game early gives you an advantage,” Siu said. “It’s the same thing we’ve seen with gaming and NFTs.”
He pointed out that social agent AI will roughly begin to take off in practice in December 2024, and that most of the population is still thinking in ChatGPT mode, that is, asking questions rather than delegating complete tasks.
Agents as a new internet layer
Siu frames agent AI as the infrastructure for what he calls Web 4. Blockchain, he argued, will allow agents to hold wallets, perform microtransactions, and establish digital identities without relying on centralized platforms such as Facebook or Apple.
“Advertising is an almost $900 billion a year industry and it’s all about discovery, and this industry will be completely turned upside down,” Siu said. “All that value goes to the agent who finds the product for you.”
He said that over the next two to three years, companies marketing to consumers will build MCP servers and CLI tools designed to approach agents rather than humans.
Ghost GDP and new economy
Regarding the problem of so-called ghost GDP, where AI agents trade with each other without increasing the wealth of humans, Siu rejected pessimism.
“A whole new economy will emerge where humans create agents or where humans themselves want to go and say, ‘Hey, look at this. Here’s what I’d like to offer you,'” Siu said. He compared this dynamic to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. In other words, activities appear abstract until downstream value is realized.
He said AI agents owning assets will create a new class of buyers, and humans who can produce what the agents value will directly benefit.
every worker becomes a manager
Regarding labor, Siu said the most valuable skill going forward will not be task execution, but agent orchestration.
“You get hired because you can manage 10 agents or 20 agents well,” he said. “A person who can manage 100 or 200 agents is more valuable than someone who can manage only one agent.”
He predicted GDP expansion, not contraction, and drew parallels with the era of personal computing. The same argument applies to music, programming and media, he said. Barriers to creation will fall, production will proliferate, and the most visionary will emerge.
Siu said the most practical path for individual investors is to have a broad basket of early-stage agent AI companies exposed, even if that means holding 50 to 70 positions. One of the group’s human-scale accomplishments justifies this approach, he said.
