Animoca’s Yat Siu Warns $900B Ad Industry Faces Collapse as AI Agents Take Over Discovery

Yat Siu Says AI Productivity Gains Are 1,000x, Tells Retail Investors to Build Wide Baskets Now

Speaking successful Miami connected The David Lin Report with David Lin and Bonnie Blockchain, Siu described the existent authorities of agentic AI arsenic comparable to seed-stage investing successful OpenAI oregon Anthropic astir 5 years ago. He told investors to enactment accordingly.

“The productivity maturation successful AI is virtually a 1,000x,” Siu said. “So we deliberation the instrumentality illustration is going to beryllium a thousand-x amongst benignant of the apical companies.”

A $10M Bet connected the Next Web

Animoca Brands, which holds much than 620 portfolio companies crossed gaming, decentralized finance ( DeFi), real-world assets, and non-fungible tokens ( NFTs), announced the money to people early-stage agentic AI infrastructure. Siu said the steadfast treats the existent infinitesimal the mode it treated gaming and NFTs successful 2021.

Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu (pictured right) discussing AI agents with David Lin (pictured middle) and Bonnie Blockchain (pictured left). Image source: Youtube.

“When you’re aboriginal to the crippled past you person an advantage,” Siu said, “and that’s the aforesaid happening that we saw with gaming and with NFTs.”

He pointed to December 2024 arsenic the approximate commencement of societal agentic AI arsenic a existent movement, noting that astir of the nationalist is inactive reasoning successful ChatGPT mode: asking questions alternatively than delegating afloat tasks.

Agents arsenic the New Internet Layer

Siu frames agentic AI arsenic the infrastructure of what helium calls Web 4. Blockchain, helium argued, gives agents the quality to clasp wallets, tally microtransactions, and found integer individuality without relying connected centralized platforms similar Facebook oregon Apple.

“Advertising is an astir $900 cardinal manufacture a year, which is each astir discovery, and it volition wholly beryllium flipped upside down,” Siu said. “All of that worth is going to spell to the agents who are going to find worldly for you.”

He said companies pitching to consumers successful the adjacent 2 to 3 years volition beryllium gathering MCP servers and CLI tools designed to scope agents, not humans.

Ghost GDP and New Economies

On the question of alleged shade GDP, wherever AI agents transact with each different without quality enrichment, Siu pushed backmost connected the pessimistic read.

“Entire caller economies travel wherever humans either make agents oregon themselves privation to spell and say, ‘Hey, look astatine this, I privation to connection you thing here,'” Siu said. He compared the dynamic to Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the enactment looks abstract until the downstream worth materializes.

He said AI agents owning assets creates a caller people of buyers, and humans who tin nutrient things those agents worth volition payment directly.

Every Worker Becomes a Manager

On labor, Siu said the astir invaluable accomplishment going guardant is cause orchestration, not task execution.

“You’re hired due to the fact that you tin negociate 10 agents good oregon 20 agents,” helium said. “The idiosyncratic who tin negociate 100 agents oregon 200 agents volition beryllium much invaluable than the idiosyncratic who tin negociate lone one.”

He projected GDP expansion, not contraction, drafting a parallel to the idiosyncratic computing era. The aforesaid argument, helium said, applies to music, programming, and media: the obstruction to instauration drops, output proliferates, and the radical with the clearest imaginativeness rise.

For retail investors, Siu said wide handbasket vulnerability to early-stage agentic AI companies is the astir applicable path, adjacent if it means holding 50 to 70 positions. One Anthropic-scale result successful that group, helium said, justifies the approach.