Much of the hype train around cryptocurrencies last year has transitioned to AI-related topics, including an entire ecosystem of scammers. The latest example is "TruthGPT Coin," a project that jumbled together AI and crypto buzzwords and was ordered to cease operations.
Back in February, Elon Musk said "What we need is TruthGPT" in a Twitter post with no further context. He later said in an interview that TruthGPT is a chatbot he wants to build, in the style of ChatGPT and Bing Chat. He said he wanted the bot "to understand the nature of the universe," in the hope that it would decide not to "annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe." Yes, those are real quotes.
There hasn't been any news since then on Musk's bizarre effort, but that didn't stop a completely unrelated project from taking the name and spinning up a related cryptocurrency. The group's own whitepaper explains that the crypto token $TRUTH was created one day after Musk's first mention of TruthGPT as a meme coin -- a cryptocurrency which only has value in its novelty or relation to a popular topic. The group released a chatbot one day later, which claims to be "a symbol of freedom" and "a light to guide us out of the dark and biased narratives thrust upon us by the forces in power."
The official website and documentation have all the hallmarks of a classic cryptocurrency scam -- little information about the team is visible on the site, and the prominent references to Elon Musk (combined with Musk saying the project name in the first place) can lead people to believe he is backing the project. There's also no technical information about the chatbot, except that it's "focused on providing an unbiased truth," and is available through Telegram and an Android application. It appears to just be using the same APIs from OpenAI as most other chatbots right now -- you can even Ctrl+F for "OpenAI" in the web app's code to see some of the API calls.
Texas and other U.S. state financial regulators ordered the project on May 3 to stop operations, pointing out the project's misleading claims and attempts to use images of public figures as endorsements." A press release said, "investors are also being told Elon Musk endorses TruthGPT Coin, and animated avatars and images of Elon Musk are being used to demonstrate his endorsement. Promotional media shows the purported involvement of various other public figures. For example, the website for TruthGPT Coin (truthgptc.com) is allegedly designed to create the appearance that Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, the founder and CEO of Binance, and Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, are part of the ecosystem."
The website for TruthGPT is still online, but the Twitter account has been updated to say, "We stop developing this project." The cryptocurrency reached a maximum value of $0.007 USD on April 20, and has now fallen to $0.002 USD.
Source: Texas State Securities Board, TruthGPT (1, 2)