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AI Podcasts

March 28, 2025

Hash Rate - Ep 103: 'It's AI' $TAO Subnet 32

Hash Rate pod - Bitcoin, AI, DePIN, DeFi

AI

Key Takeaways:


1. Niche Focus Wins: Its AI demonstrates the power of specializing in one thing (AI text detection) within the BitTensor ecosystem, achieving leading accuracy and carving out a clear market position.


2. Ecosystem Arbitrage: There's a significant valuation gap between BitTensor AI projects (like Its AI or ReadyAI) and comparable VC-funded companies (GPTZero, Scale AI), suggesting potential upside once accessibility improves.


3. The Bridge is Coming: Easier access via wrapped tokens or user-friendly platforms bridging BitTensor to chains like Solana/Ethereum is the critical next step for unlocking subnet value and attracting mainstream capital.

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March 28, 2025

Subnet 3 Templar –World’s First Distributed, Permissionless, Incentivized Open Source AI Training

Opentensor Foundation

AI

Key Takeaways:


1.  Permissionless Works: Templar validates that truly open, decentralized AI training with economic incentives is not just theory—it's running, learning, and stabilizing *now*.
2.  Incentives Align: Token ownership fundamentally shifts dynamics, turning potential adversaries into collaborative builders invested in the network's success.
3.  The Future is Co-Owned: Templar paves the way for globally co-owned, state-of-the-art AI models, potentially outcompeting even the most well-funded centralized labs and offering a more equitable model for AI development.

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March 28, 2025

Novelty Search March 27, 2025

taostats

AI

Key Takeaways:


1.  Incentivized Decentralized Training Works: Templar demonstrates that coordinating anonymous miners globally via crypto-economic incentives to train a single AI model is feasible, moving beyond permissioned compute pools.
2.  Production is the Only True Test: Real-world deployment with adversarial miners is non-negotiable for building robust decentralized systems, revealing exploits impossible to find otherwise. Templar's rapid iteration (>200 runs) provides a significant edge.
3.  Community & Ownership are Superpowers: Openly sharing struggles and leveraging tokenomics to give miners ownership transformed Templar's development, aligning incentives and fostering collective problem-solving far exceeding a centralized team's capacity.

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March 24, 2025

Steffen Cruz and Will Squires: Macrocosmos, AI, APEX, Data, Bittensor Subnets 1 9 13 25 37 | Ep. 32

Ventura Labs

AI

Key Takeaways:

  1. The open-source AI landscape has rapidly evolved, with models like Deepseek and R1 significantly impacting the decentralized AI space.
  2. Macrocosmos focuses on building high-quality, feature-rich products that leverage the power of Bittensor's network and incentivize miner innovation.
  3. Long-term vision, community engagement, and sustainable monetization strategies are critical for success in the maturing Bittensor ecosystem.
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March 24, 2025

ARC Prize Version 2 Launch Video!

Machine Learning Street Talk

AI

Key Takeaways:

  1. ARC V2 represents a significant advancement in benchmarking AI reasoning capabilities, moving beyond the limitations of pre-trained language models.
  2. Efficiency, not just capability, is a critical aspect of intelligence, and ARC V2 effectively measures this efficiency gap between AI and humans.
  3. While O3 demonstrates early signs of fluid intelligence, it is not yet human-level and further breakthroughs are needed to achieve true AGI.
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March 24, 2025

Steffen Cruz and Will Squires: Macrocosmos, AI, APEX, Data, Bittensor Subnets 1 9 13 25 37 | Ep. 32

Ventura Labs

AI

Key Takeaways:

  1. Macrocosmos is building an interconnected suite of products (Constellation) that leverage different Bittensor subnets, aiming for a synergistic approach to decentralized AI.
  2. The focus on building high-quality, feature-rich products over simply competing on price highlights a maturing mindset within the Bittensor ecosystem.
  3. The emphasis on long-term vision, community engagement, and sustainable monetization strategies is crucial for navigating the rapidly evolving decentralized AI landscape.
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March 23, 2025

The Magic of LLM Distillation — Rishi Agarwal, Google DeepMind

Latent Space

AI

Key Takeaways:

  1. Distillation is more than just model compression; it's a powerful technique for improving LLM performance and enabling practical deployment.
  2. On-policy distillation offers significant advantages over traditional methods, especially for complex, long-horizon tasks.
  3. Choose the right distillation strategy based on the specific needs of your application, balancing complexity, cost, and desired performance.
  4. Explore on-policy distillation if your model tackles complex or lengthy generation tasks.
  5. Prioritize simple distillation methods initially, and escalate to more complex techniques only when necessary.
  6. Don't underestimate the value of distillation; a small improvement during training can yield massive benefits during deployment.
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March 23, 2025

Exploring Program Synthesis: Francois Chollet, Kevin Ellis, Zenna Tavares

Machine Learning Street Talk

AI

Key Takeaways:

  1. Deep learning alone is insufficient for program synthesis; symbolic approaches and hybrid models are crucial for tackling discrete, algorithmic tasks.
  2. Developing dedicated infrastructure for program synthesis is premature; further research is needed to identify effective, scalable techniques.
  3. Benchmarks like Arc are essential for driving progress in program synthesis, providing focused environments to study generalization and adaptation.
  4. Deep learning's strength lies in pattern recognition, not program generation.  Symbolic methods or hybrid models are key to unlocking the true potential of program synthesis.
  5. A "Keras for Program Synthesis" is coming, but not yet.  More foundational research is needed before building specialized frameworks.
  6. Arc, particularly Arc 2,  is a crucial testing ground for stronger generalization in AI, pushing beyond mere interpolation towards true compositional understanding.
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March 22, 2025

Test-Time Adaptation: the key to reasoning with DL

Machine Learning Street Talk

AI

Key Takeaways:

  1. Test-time adaptation is a powerful technique for tackling abstract reasoning tasks like ARC, enabling neural networks to adapt to novel perceptual challenges and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
  2. Prioritizing raw representations and flexible contextualization over specialized encodings or program synthesis can be crucial for handling ARC’s adversarial and abstract nature.
  3. The future of reasoning with deep learning lies in exploring creative test-time compute strategies, including more nuanced pre-training and diverse benchmarking, to further unlock the potential of neural networks for complex reasoning.
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Crypto Podcasts

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 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 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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November 14, 2025

Is The Crypto Bull Market Already Over?

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. The Fee Switch Is On. Uniswap's pivot to real-yield tokenomics is a watershed moment. Expect other DeFi protocols to follow, finally aligning token value with protocol success and rewarding long-term holders over mercenaries.
  2. Onshore ICOs Are Back. Coinbase’s new token sales platform for US retail is a massive signal that the industry believes the regulatory tide has turned. This could unlock a new wave of capital and mainstream participation.
  3. Privacy Is A High-Stakes Gamble. While the market is rewarding privacy tokens, the 5-year prison sentence for a wallet developer is a brutal reminder of the risks. Until clear rules are established, building privacy tools in the US remains legally treacherous.
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November 13, 2025

Hash Rate - Ep 144 - SCORE Subnet 44

Hash Rate pod - Bittensor $TAO & Subnets

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Privacy is Paramount. SCORE’s use of TEEs for a private data track is the key that unlocks enterprise adoption, proving that decentralized networks can handle sensitive information securely.
  2. The 1/10th Price Model Wins. Leveraging Bittensor’s incentive structure allows subnets to radically undercut legacy competitors on price without sacrificing quality, opening up previously inaccessible markets.
  3. Tie Rewards to Revenue. The most sustainable tokenomic model directly links network emissions to real-world cash flow, ensuring the subnet's economy is grounded in tangible business success, not just speculation.
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November 12, 2025

Lean Ethereum: How L1 Reaches 10k TPS | Beast Mode & Fort Mode

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Ethereum's New Offense:** Lean Ethereum marks a strategic pivot from a defensive, decentralization-first posture to an offensive "Beast Mode," targeting 10,000 TPS on L1—a 500x increase—to become the settlement layer for all of finance.
  2. **The Validator Role is Evolving:** The future validator will verify tiny cryptographic proofs on cheap hardware (like a smartphone), not execute massive blocks. This radical shift, enabled by ZK-EVMs, simultaneously boosts scale and decentralization.
  3. **L1 Scaling is Now Possible Without Centralization:** Unlike competitors who scale by using powerful hardware in data centers, Ethereum's use of SNARKs allows it to scale L1 while *decreasing* hardware requirements, reinforcing its core value proposition.
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