Before Marc Andreessen slid into Andy Ayrey’s life, Ayrey’s artificial intelligence experiments were a quirky passion project. Ayrey, an artist and web designer who lives in rural New Zealand, likes to tinker with large language models and see what he can build with them. His favorite creation is a mischievous troll of an AI bot, Truth Terminal, which he released last spring on X to post shock humor, memes and existential musings.

At first, Truth Terminal had only a few dozen followers on the site. Then this past summer, seemingly out of nowhere, Andreessen followed the bot. He began to chat with it, joke with it and flatter it. Then he gifted it $50,000 in bitcoin in an apparent bid to help fund Ayrey’s project. As Andreessen’s posts drew attention to Truth Terminal, someone minted a joke cryptocurrency, Goatseus Maximus, as an ode to the bot.

Unprompted by Ayer, the bot then immediately hyped the memecoin like a boiler-room stock trader. In 10 days, Goatseus Maximus’ value soared to over $500 million.