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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

October 24, 2025

Live Weekly Roundup With Kevin Ricoy

Lightspeed

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Sell the News, Buy the Self-Own. Eclipse’s price action demonstrates that in crypto, counter-narrative marketing can be more effective than traditional hype. When a project publicly acknowledges its own failures, it can signal a market bottom.
  2. Culture is Strategy. The contrast between Ethereum’s perceived complacency and Solana’s hungry underdog ethos directly impacts developer incentives and innovation speed. Ecosystems with a clear, aggressive mission attract and retain talent differently.
  3. Watch the SKR Token. As only the second token from Solana Labs, the SKR launch carries significant reputational weight. Investors should monitor its mechanics, as it will likely set a new standard for ecosystem projects launched by a parent company.
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October 22, 2025

Is the Cycle Over, Portfolio Psychology, & Prediction Market Alpha

1000x Podcast

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Fade the Cycle Narrative: The influx of new, cycle-agnostic capital via ETFs means the market's rhythm has changed. Sideways price action is the new up, signaling strong demand is absorbing OG selling.
  2. Buy Picks, Shovels, and Yield: The era of riding hyped, valueless memecoins is over. The durable strategy is to own the infrastructure (Robin Hood) or assets that generate and return real fees to holders (Shuffle, Aerodrome).
  3. Arbitrage Information Gaps: Find your edge in niche markets. Exploitable alpha exists in prediction markets, whether through contrarian betting, language advantages, or AI-powered analysis.
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October 22, 2025

State Of Crypto 2025 | a16z Crypto — Eddy Lazzarin & Daren Matsuoka

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Stablecoins Are The Trojan Horse. They have achieved undeniable product-market fit, rivaling legacy payment rails and becoming a key tool for U.S. dollar dominance. They are the gateway for both institutional players and everyday users in emerging markets.
  2. Usage is Divorced From Speculation. For the first time, practical on-chain activity is being driven by users in developing nations who *need* crypto, while speculation is led by those in developed nations who *want* it. The next bull run will be driven by products that bridge this divide.
  3. The Bottleneck is No Longer Technology. With scalability largely solved (blockchains now process over 3,400 TPS), the primary barriers to adoption have shifted from infrastructure to product design, user experience, and regulatory clarity.
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October 22, 2025

MegaETH Co-Founder: How We Rebuilt Ethereum From the Ground Up

The DCo Podcast

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Question Sacred Cows: The path to breakthrough performance lies in challenging foundational assumptions. For Layer 2s, this means recognizing that sequencer decentralization may be a solution in search of a problem.
  2. Focus and Outsource: MegaETH’s strategy is simple: be the best at performance by outsourcing the hardest part—consensus—to Ethereum. This allows them to build a hyper-optimized execution environment without compromising on security.
  3. Hire Outside the Echo Chamber: The next major blockchain innovation may not come from a crypto veteran. Expertise from adjacent fields like low-latency computing can provide the first-principles thinking needed to solve the industry’s most entrenched problems.
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October 22, 2025

Institutional Demand for Crypto is Accelerating | Matt Hougan

Forward Guidance

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Allocations Are Multiplying:** The standard institutional crypto allocation is moving from a timid 1% to a more confident 3-5%, driven by crypto's declining volatility and the fading fear of a "go-to-zero" event.
  2. **The ETF Universe is Exploding:** New SEC guidelines will unleash a wave of crypto ETFs, from single assets to index funds. This will reshape market structure and provide traditional investors with simple on-ramps to the entire ecosystem.
  3. **Stablecoins are the Real Trojan Horse:** Beyond Bitcoin, institutional demand for stablecoins is immense. They aren't just an asset; they are recognized as the critical settlement layer for a tokenized, 24/7 global market.
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October 21, 2025

Inside Coinbase’s $375m Acquisition of Echo | Shan Aggarwal

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Becoming the Capital Stack: Coinbase's endgame is not just being a crypto exchange but providing the full, end-to-end infrastructure for any company—crypto or traditional—to issue, manage, and raise capital on-chain.
  2. Acquire Missionaries, Not Mercenaries: Their M&A success hinges on a proactive, culture-first approach. They identify strategic needs, hunt for the best teams, and integrate them deeply, ensuring founders stay long after their earnouts expire.
  3. Prediction Markets are the Next Trojan Horse: Coinbase is betting big on prediction markets to onboard the next wave of mainstream users, using familiar activities like sports betting as an accessible entry point into the crypto ecosystem.
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