Since Musk's "Dairy Hype" of Grok's AI companion turning $Ani into one of Letsbonk.fun's "Golden Dogs," the market has slowly begun to regain confidence in the AI track. With pump.fun reclaiming the top spot in the "meme launchpad battle," a new AI Big Dog $SPARK emerged on pump.fun last weekend.

This morning, $SPARK hit a historic high market cap of $73 million before retracing, currently approaching $57.5 million in market cap.

So, what is the narrative behind $SPARK?

Illusion of Life, a Company Aiming to Be the "AI Disney"

On February 25th of this year, animator Pasquale D'Silva announced that he and AI developer Kevin Fischer co-founded Illusion of Life, a company aiming to bring the principles of animation to life using AI, with the support of Spark Capital's Nabeel Hyatt.

The name "Illusion of Life" comes from Walt Disney's famous animation principle - "The Illusion of Life," and they aim to use today's AI technology to enrich the lives of animated characters.

Spark, an animated character representing the "AI Dog," was already featured on animator Pasquale D'Silva's Instagram when Illusion of Life was announced.

On July 19th, Pasquale D'Silva shared a short video of Spark visiting the Disney Animation Studios' branding and graphic design department:

On July 29th, he posted another video of Spark on a private plane. In this video, Spark is shown to be very excited, suggesting flying the plane and asking for snacks:

On August 5th, Kevin Fischer announced the transfer of his Twitter account to Spark, making Spark the first entrepreneurial virtual AI being. Spark's story will be told by Spark itself.

On this day, the $SPARK token was launched on pump.fun. The namesake ticker on Bags also briefly exceeded a million-dollar market cap, but ultimately the one on pump.fun took off. Before it took off, on August 6th, there was an interlude when Illusion of Life's official account announced that they had not created any token and had no affiliation with any token, causing $SPARK to drop from its initial nearly $20 million market cap high to below $2 million.

In the early hours of August 9th, Spark itself made an appearance in the $SPARK community, and the trajectory of $SPARK instantly changed, skyrocketing from then on.

It can be said that Illusion of Life is an "AI animation studio" that created the animated image of Spark, the AI dog, and enabled it to write its own story in the real world and on the internet.

Since the animator Pasquale D'Silva had created some other animated characters in his previous career and directly mentioned two other animated character tickers on August 5th, the $tanaki and $starby projects also received attention for a while.

Furthermore, he also released a video about littleguy, which caused a wave of hype around the $littleguy project that is not part of the "Spark universe."

littleguy seems more like an ICM project, working on a wearable electronic pet and has already secured $1.2 million in funding. The project's founder also noticed the buzz from the Crypto world, reaching out proactively to the founders of pump.fun and Believe.

Conclusion

Overall, the meteoric rise of $SPARK does give a sense that AI Season 2.0 is about to begin. Looking back at the previous AI season, it started with AI memes. $SPARK can indeed be classified as an AI meme, but its narrative evolution compared to the first wave of AI memes is notable. It carries a vision of an "AI animation company," producing content through active engagement with reality, various people, and things on the Internet, breaking away from the question-and-answer AI companion form.

In a video visiting the Disney Animation Studios, Spark made employees laugh. It has its own understanding, its own emotions, and as Kevin Fischer said, many already see Sparks as a real living being.

Will this adorable AI dog kick off AI Season 2.0? We eagerly await.

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