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In focus
- Animoca Brands bets on AI agents to extend its gaming and Web3 strategy
- Microdrama startups compete to control more of the AI content pipeline
- A look back on Vidio’s experiments with turning streaming audiences into ecommerce customers
Hello reader,
Anyone who has played The Sims knows this routine: give a character a task, speed up the clock, and watch them get on with their little digital life. Now imagine that character leaving the screen to book your flight, chase sales leads, or even earn money for you.
That is roughly how Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu wants us to see AI agents. After years of championing Web3 gaming, the Hong Kong-based company has launched Minds, a platform that combines over 50 AI models with a marketplace of roughly 5,000 agent “skills.”
Siu calls this an evolution rather than a pivot. In this scenario, life is the game, agents are the players, and crypto could give them the wallets they need to become useful. But as my colleague Scott explores in our first top story, Animoca still needs to prove that this playful framing can lead to a sustainable business.
Meanwhile, AI is redrawing another entertainment industry: microdramas. With the tech driving the cost of production down, studios, video-generation platforms, and distributors are expanding into one another’s territory.
Yet our second featured piece finds that platforms such as TikTok still control the audience, and therefore, much of the leverage.
AI may lower the cost of creating content and completing tasks, as these two stories show. But the bigger prize may go to whoever owns the marketplace, distribution, and relationship with the end user.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
Top Stories
1️⃣ Life’s a game, and AI agents are Animoca’s new play
Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands / Digital collage by Ulla, photos courtesy of Yat Siu
Animoca says using Chinese open-source models for most of the agents’ workload within its new platform Minds has cut its compute costs by roughly 20x. But the roughly 1.3 trillion tokens generated on OpenRouter is only a signal of usage, and the company has yet to disclose user or revenue figures as its broader business seeks renewed growth.
2️⃣ AI came for microdramas. Now it wants the whole picture
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