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AI Podcasts

July 29, 2025

Will Squires & Chris Zacharia: Macrocosmos Bittensor Subnet 13, Data Scraping, AI Training | Ep. 54

Ventura Labs

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Macrocosmos is transforming Subnet 13 from a brute-force data scraper into a sophisticated, revenue-generating marketplace that serves as a foundational utility for the entire Bittensor ecosystem. Their core advice to the ecosystem is to relentlessly pursue real-world market validation over passively collecting protocol emissions.
  2. Data is the New Oil, Subnet 13 is the Rig: With 55 billion rows scraped, Subnet 13 is the de facto data layer for Bittensor, providing the essential fuel for everything from AI model training to real-time sentiment analysis for other subnets.
  3. From Raw Scale to Refined Value: The focus is shifting from merely scraping data to making it accessible. The upcoming "Data Universe" marketplace aims to be a "Bittensor Hugging Face," turning a chaotic data ocean into a library of actionable insights.
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July 28, 2025

James Woodman & Joshua Brown: Targon, Manifold Labs, Bittensor Subnet 4, Compute Markets | Ep. 53

Ventura Labs

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Price Discovery is the Product: Targon's auction mechanism isn't just a feature; it's the core product. By forcing compute providers to bid for their payout, the system creates a hyper-competitive environment that reveals the true, market-driven price of compute, incentivizing efficiency and driving costs down.
  2. The Race for Organic Revenue: The entire model hinges on achieving "escape velocity" where organic revenue from inference clients outpaces the reliance on network emissions. With $52,000 returned to the subnet in just eight days, they are proving the model works, but scaling this revenue is the central challenge.
  3. The Future is Financialized Compute: The end goal extends far beyond simply renting out GPUs. By establishing a liquid spot market, Targon is laying the groundwork to introduce financial derivatives like forward contracts and options, allowing enterprises to hedge against compute price volatility just as they do with other commodities.
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July 28, 2025

Balaji Srinivasan: How AI Will Change Politics, War, and Money

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Embrace Polytheism, Not Monotheism.** The future contains many culturally-specific, specialized AIs, not one superintelligence. The "war of the gods" is a more apt metaphor than a single, all-powerful deity.
  2. **Crypto is AI's Anchor to Reality.** As AI generates infinite probabilistic fakes, crypto's deterministic, on-chain data becomes the gold standard for verifiable truth in finance, media, and beyond.
  3. **The Real AI Threat is Physical, Not Persuasive.** Forget rogue chatbots. The immediate danger is autonomous drones, which are already transforming warfare and turning digital firewalls into hard, physical borders.
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July 26, 2025

Intelligence = Doing More with Less (David Krakauer)

Machine Learning Street Talk

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Redefine Your Metrics. Judge intelligence not by what a system knows, but by its resourcefulness—its ability to solve novel problems with minimal information.
  2. Demand Deeper Proof. Don't accept claims of "emergence" based on performance charts. Look for evidence of a representational phase shift—a simpler, more abstract model of the world forming inside the machine.
  3. Think for Yourself. Resist the powerful urge to outsource your thinking to AI. Actively using your cognitive "muscles" is the only defense against the atrophy that convenience culture promotes.
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July 26, 2025

Bittensor Brief #2: VoidAI Wrapped TAO & Subnet Tokens

Hash Rate pod - Bitcoin, AI, DePIN, DeFi

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Arbitrage Unlocked: The bridge exposes deeply undervalued Bittensor subnet tokens to the Solana ecosystem, creating a direct pathway to capture the 100x-1000x valuation gap between on-chain and off-chain AI projects.
  2. Incentivized Liquidity: Don’t be deterred by low initial liquidity. VoidAI's Subnet 106 is purpose-built to reward liquidity providers, creating a powerful economic engine designed to bootstrap and sustain deep markets for wrapped Bittensor assets.
  3. AI Meets DeFi: Wrapped TAO and subnet tokens can now be plugged into any Solana DeFi protocol. This opens a new frontier for financial products, allowing users to lend, borrow, and build derivatives on top of assets powered by a decentralized machine intelligence network.
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July 25, 2025

Bittensor Novelty Search :: Subnet 62 Ridges :: Open-Source AI

Opentensor Foundation

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Incentives Outpace Centralized R&D.** Ridges proves that a transparent, competitive market can drive faster innovation than a closed-door lab. The "winner-takes-all" model forces rapid, compounding improvements that are immediately absorbed by the entire network.
  2. **Bittensor's Economic Flywheel is Real.** Ridges is a prime example of subnet composability, creating a powerful economic moat. By using other subnets for cheap inference, it builds a product with R&D and operational costs orders of magnitude lower than competitors.
  3. **The Future is Abstracted.** The plan to onboard developers via Google/Plaid logins with a 30% fee is a brilliant Trojan horse. It lowers the barrier to entry for top talent while creating a powerful, built-in incentive for them to dive deeper into the crypto ecosystem to maximize earnings.
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July 23, 2025

The U.S. Can’t Build AI Without These Materials

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Mining is a software problem. The biggest gains aren't just in new drilling tech, but in using AI to optimize complex, thousand-variable refining processes and automate construction, slashing project timelines from years to months.
  2. Vertical integration is non-negotiable. Selling point solutions to "calcified" incumbents is a dead end. To capture efficiency gains, a company must own the entire process from mine to metal, internalizing risk and innovation.
  3. Government’s biggest lever is buying. To unlock trillions in private capital for this critical sector, the government must act as a reliable customer, providing offtake agreements and price floors that de-risk projects in a volatile commodity market.
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July 22, 2025

Live Demo & Review of the Newest AI Browsers: Dia vs Comet

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Comet is the agent, Dia is the assistant. Comet acts on your behalf across your digital life (scheduling, buying, emailing), while Dia excels as a hyper-competent assistant for automating complex research and content creation.
  2. The killer app is integration, not just chat. The browser that wins will be the one that most seamlessly orchestrates a user's entire digital ecosystem. Comet’s ability to connect and push tasks to core apps gives it the current edge.
  3. The sleeping giants are waking up. With vast user data and powerful proprietary models, Google and OpenAI’s eventual entry into the agentic browser market will be the next major catalyst, likely redefining the competitive landscape.
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July 21, 2025

Pushing compute to the limits of physics

Machine Learning Street Talk

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Hardware is the New Frontier. The scaling race isn't about building more data centers for the same old chips. The next 1000x improvement will come from a fundamental paradigm shift that works with physics, not against it.
  2. Noise is a Feature, Not a Bug. The future of efficient computing lies in harnessing stochasticity. The "noise" we spend billions to suppress in classical chips is the very resource that can power probabilistic AI models with unparalleled efficiency.
  3. Prepare for an Algorithmic Renaissance. The dominance of Transformers is a temporary state dictated by current hardware. As thermodynamic computers become available, developers and researchers should dust off their probabilistic ML textbooks—the algorithms of tomorrow will look very different.
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Crypto Podcasts

November 20, 2025

The Future of Institutional Crypto (What Banks Actually Need)

The DCo Podcast

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Solve the Privacy Bug.** Institutions will not move sensitive operations onto fully transparent ledgers. The future is permissioned visibility, where regulators and involved parties can see data, but the public cannot.
  2. **Composability is the Killer App.** The true unlock for on-chain finance is the ability to atomically combine different assets and workflows without operational risk. Fragmented L2s endanger this core value proposition.
  3. **The Next Wave is Capital Markets Infrastructure.** The long-term moat for any network targeting institutional finance is not just its tech, but its ecosystem of interconnected banks, funds, and market makers operating in a compliant, private environment.
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November 19, 2025

Why Cross-Border Flows Matter More Than Rate Cuts | Capital Flows

Forward Guidance

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Stop Obsessing Over the Fed. The dominant force driving market liquidity is the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China, which dictates massive cross-border capital flows and underpins U.S. asset valuations.
  2. This Is a Repricing, Not a Recession. The current market drawdown is a healthy positioning unwind, not a crisis. The lack of a fear bid in long-term bonds signals this is an opportunity to buy the dip in a structural bull market.
  3. Bitcoin Failed the Safe-Haven Test. Gold remains the premier asset for hedging geopolitical risk. Bitcoin has demonstrated it is a high-beta risk asset, with its recent rally driven more by speculative corporate treasury activity than a fundamental macro role.
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November 18, 2025

How Pudgy Penguins Could Become a $1,000,000,000 Brand

The DCo Podcast

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Value is Decoupling from EBITDA. A brand's true worth is increasingly measured by its cultural impact, not just its revenue. Tokenization provides the mechanism to price and trade this cultural capital.
  2. Memecoins are a Feature, Not a Bug. They are the earliest, purest form of tokenized culture, proving that a financial layer can supercharge a community's growth and alignment.
  3. Invest in Cultural Arbitrage. The biggest opportunities are in projects and brands whose cultural influence dramatically outweighs their current financial metrics. This gap between impact and income is where tokenization creates exponential value.
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November 18, 2025

Bitcoin Breaks $95k, Crypto’s Valuation Problem, & The Path To Real On-Chain Users

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Short Everything But Bitcoin.** The vast majority of crypto assets trade at unjustifiable multiples based on cyclical, speculative revenue. Bitcoin, as a "digital gold" macro hedge, is the only asset with a durable investment thesis that stands apart from the overvalued tech plays.
  2. **The L1 Thesis is Dead.** Investing in L1s is a bet on obsolete infrastructure. Future returns will be captured by killer applications that build real businesses and bring non-speculative users on-chain, not by the commoditized blockspace they run on.
  3. **Acquire Users, Don't Wait For Them.** Crypto's central problem is its failure to grow its user base. The winning strategy is to buy existing businesses with real customers and integrate blockchain technology, thereby acquiring distribution rather than trying to build it from scratch in a hyper-competitive market.
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November 17, 2025

The Hidden Flaw in Blockchain Design (Dune Analytics)

The DCo Podcast

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Transparency Is the Best Moderator. Instead of policing content, Dune makes the underlying source code for every analysis public, empowering the community to self-regulate and verify data quality.
  2. Build With the Ethos of the Ecosystem. Dune succeeded by embracing crypto's open-source nature, creating a collaborative platform that felt native to the space, unlike closed-source competitors.
  3. Incentives Don't Have to Be Financial. Reputation, influence, and the ability to contribute to a shared body of knowledge are powerful motivators for community participation in open platforms.
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November 14, 2025

State of The Market, Monad's ICO & The Stablecoin Gold Rush | Weekly Roundup

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Corporates are building walled gardens.** Major players are leveraging public chains to create ecosystems they control, launching the "corporate chain meta" where activity is pulled onto proprietary networks like Base.
  2. **Stablecoin M&A is white-hot, but frothy.** The frantic rush to acquire stablecoin infrastructure is driven by stock market optics as much as strategy, echoing the 2017 "add blockchain to your name" craze.
  3. **Capital formation is returning to regulated US platforms.** Monad's ICO on Coinbase, offering zero lockups for US investors, sets a new precedent for compliant token launches and challenges the dominance of offshore exchanges.
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