The weekend hackathon project, in which AI agents can talk to each other on their mobile phones in robotic languages, is something humans can’t understand and has been word-of-mouth on social media over the past week.
The project, called Gibberlink, was created by two meta-software engineers during a hackathon competition in London hosted by ElevenLabs and Andreessen Horowitz.
With Gibberlink, when an AI agent is talking on the phone with another AI agent, project creators Boris Starkov and Anton Pidkuiko spoke to TechCrunch in an interview. When an AI agent finds that he is talking to another AI agent, Gibberlink encourages the agent to switch to a more efficient communications protocol called GgWave.
GgWave is an open source library where each sound represents a small amount of data. This allows computers to communicate faster and more efficiently than they can by using human speech. But to the human ear, GgWave sounds like a series of “beeps” and “boops.” I think it sounds like the mother tongue of a computer.
It seems unlikely that two AI agents will call each other today, but it is not impossible to imagine these scenarios happening anytime soon. Companies are increasingly replacing call centre employees with AI agents from 11 enlabs, Level AI, Retell AI, and other voice-based AI startups.
At the same time, tech giants like Openai, Google, and Amazon are beginning to implement consumer AI agents that can handle complex tasks on your behalf. These AI agents may be able to call the customer service center immediately.
In this potential future, Gibberlink can increase communication efficiency between AI agents. The AI voice model is very good at translating human speech into tokens, but the AI model is understandable, but when two AI agents are talking to each other, the whole process is very intensive and just unnecessary. Starkov and Pidkuiko estimate that AI agents communicating via GgWave can reduce computational costs by several orders of magnitude.
But for today, it’s just a cool project. Starkov and Pidkuiko have created a website that can be opened on two devices to watch AI agents discuss each other on GGWave.
Like a good sci-fi movie, the Gibberlink demo has sparked widespread curiosity and anxiety about the future of AI agents. In the week since the London Hackathon, Gibberlink’s video demonstration has earned over 15 million views on X and was reposted by YouTube’s most-spanning technology reviewer Marques Brownlee.
However, Starkov and Pidkuiko emphasize that the underlying technology of Gibberlink is not new. It goes back to the dial-up internet modems of the 1980s.
Some may recall the distinctive sounds of early computers that communicate with modems via home landlines, a process known as “handshake.” Essentially, this handshake uses a robotic language to represent data transfer. This is basically similar to what’s happening between AI agents via Gibberlink.
Starkov and Pidkuiko also noted that the virus outbreak around Gibberlink has its own life. Someone has purchased the domain gibberlink.com and is currently about to sell it for $85,000. Others have created a memo coin for the giverlink, but several scammers are selling webinars that are allegedly teaching “agent-to-agent communication.”
Currently, Gibberlink creators say they are not commercializing the project, making it clear that it has nothing to do with work in Meta. Instead, Starkov and Pidkuiko have an open source Gibberlink on Github, but they say they may work on some additional tools related to the project in their free time and will release it in the near future.