An AGI Moonshot, Not an LLM Factory: Hone’s singular focus is solving the ARC-AGI benchmark to achieve true generalization. This is a high-risk, high-reward play for a step-function leap in AI, not just another incremental improvement.
Architecture Over Data: The strategy is to out-innovate, not out-collect. By exploring novel architectures like JEPA, Hone aims to create models that think more efficiently and don't depend on ever-expanding datasets, sidestepping the data moat of centralized giants.
The Business Model is the Breakthrough: There is no immediate revenue. The investment thesis is straightforward: solve AGI, earn the ultimate bragging rights, and then monetize the world’s first truly intelligent model through distribution partners like Targon.
Vertical Integration is Non-Negotiable: To build AGI, the old model of horizontal specialization is dead. Owning the stack—from research to infrastructure to product—is the only way to move fast enough.
Ship to Socialize: Don't build AGI in a lab and drop it on an unsuspecting world. Products like Sora are deliberate steps to co-evolve technology with society, managing impact through iterative, public-facing releases.
The Real Turing Test is Science: The true measure of AI's power is its ability to make novel scientific discoveries. Altman believes GPT-5 is already approaching this milestone, which will have a more profound impact on humanity than any chatbot.
Stop Fearing Parameters. When in doubt, go bigger. Scale is not just about capacity; it’s a tool for inducing a powerful simplicity bias that improves generalization and paradoxically reduces overfitting.
Trade Hard Constraints for Soft Biases. Instead of rigidly constraining your model architecture, use gentle encouragements. An expressive model with a soft simplicity bias will find the simple solution if the data supports it, while retaining the flexibility to capture true complexity.
Think Like a Bayesian. Even if you don't run complex MCMC, adopt the core principle of marginalization. Techniques like ensembling or stochastic weight averaging approximate the benefits of considering multiple solutions, leading to more robust and generalizable models.
Incentives Dictate Intelligence. Mantis's breakthrough is its reward function. By precisely measuring a miner's marginal contribution, it makes unique alpha the only profitable strategy and naturally defends against Sybil attacks.
The Ensemble is the Alpha. The network’s power lies not in finding one genius quant, but in combining many good-enough signals into one great one. The collective intelligence is designed to be far more valuable than any individual participant.
The Future is Verifiable, On-Chain Alpha. Mantis plans to monetize by auctioning its predictive signals, creating a transparent marketplace for intelligence and proving that a decentralized network can produce a product valuable enough to compete with Wall Street's top firms.
Reward Function is Everything. Mantis’s success hinges on its information-gain-based reward system, which attributes value based on a miner’s marginal contribution to a collective ensemble, not just their individual accuracy.
Inherent Sybil Resistance. By rewarding unique signals, the incentive mechanism naturally discourages miners from running the same model across many UIDs, solving a critical vulnerability in decentralized AI networks.
The Product is Verifiable Alpha. The endgame is not just to build a subnet but to produce a monetizable product: high-quality financial signals, auctioned to the highest bidder and backed by an immutable on-chain performance record.
Google's "Tax on GDP" Is Under Threat. AI is eroding the informational searches that feed Google's funnel and will eventually intercept high-intent commercial queries, redirecting economic power to new agentic platforms.
The Future of Shopping Is Agentic, Not Search-Based. Consumers will delegate research and purchasing to specialized AI agents that optimize every variable, from product choice to payment method, fundamentally changing how brands acquire customers.
Trust Is the Ultimate Moat. In a world of automated "crap," business models built on human trust and strict curation, like Costco's, become exceptionally defensible.
AI's next frontier isn't just language; it's simulating life. The "virtual cell"—a model that predicts how to change a cell's state—is the industry's next "AlphaFold moment," aiming to compress drug discovery from years of lab work into forward passes of a neural network.
Biology's core bottleneck is physical, not digital. Unlike pure software, progress is gated by the "lab-in-the-loop" reality: every AI prediction must be validated by slow, expensive physical experiments. Solving this requires new platforms that can scale the generation of high-quality biological data.
The biotech business model needs a new playbook. With a 90% clinical trial failure rate, the economics are broken. The future belongs to companies that either A) use AI to drastically improve the hit rate of drug targets or B) tackle massive markets like obesity, where GLP-1s proved the prize is worth the squeeze.
Enterprise AI is a Services Business. The best models are not enough. Success requires deep integration via "Forward Deployed Engineers" who build the necessary data scaffolding and orchestration layers.
GPT-5 Was Co-developed with Customers. Its focus on "craft" (behavior, tone) over raw benchmarks was a direct result of an intensive feedback loop with enterprise partners, making it more practical for real-world use.
Bet on Applications, Not Tooling. The speakers are short the entire category of AI tooling (frameworks, vector DBs), arguing the underlying tech stack is evolving too rapidly. Long-term value will accrue to those building applications in high-impact sectors like healthcare.
**Ride the Wave, Don't Fight It.** Exponential forces like Moore's Law and network effects will overwhelm any product tactic. Your first job is to identify the fundamental technological or social current you're riding.
**Build a Tool, Then a Network.** Defensibility in consumer tech often comes from network effects, but you can’t start there. Solve a user’s problem in single-player mode first to build the critical mass needed for an unbeatable network.
**Explore the Fringe.** The future is being prototyped in niche subreddits and hobbyist communities. To find the next big thing, look for small groups of hyper-enthusiastic people working on things that seem like toys today.
Stop Pricing in Fiat: The BTC/Gold ratio is the clearest signal of Bitcoin’s fundamental adoption, stripping away the distortion of dollar debasement.
Mean Reversion Points to $150k+: The established BTC/Gold trend channel since 2023 is screaming higher. A simple return to the channel’s midpoint targets a $150k–$160k Bitcoin price by year-end.
Gold's Rally is Bitcoin's Tailwind: Gold’s new role as a de-dollarization hedge for nations and the subsequent portfolio rebalancing from gold profits into BTC create powerful dual-demand drivers for Bitcoin.
Profit, Don't HODL. The current market is a trader’s paradise, not an investor’s dream. The strategy is to ride the seasonal Q4 pump and exit by January, refusing to get caught in another brutal bear cycle.
Fade the Old, Farm the New. Capital is mercenary, flowing from established tokens to the next hot airdrop farm or launch. The relentless hunt for volatility means older coins are treated as exit liquidity for the next shiny object.
Unlocks Are the Silent Killer. Before investing, map out the token unlock schedule. Even fundamentally sound projects with strong revenue face a massive gravitational pull on their price from insider and team unlocks.
**Stablecoins Are Rebranding Crypto.** The FinTech industry is adopting stablecoin technology not as a niche crypto asset, but as the foundational layer for "FinTech 3.0," poised to overhaul global payments.
**The EVM Is The New COBOL.** Specialized payments chains are standardizing the EVM as the backend for modern finance, creating high-throughput, compliant on-ramps that will bring trillions in TradFi volume on-chain.
**Payments Are Just The Beginning.** Once the world rebuilds its payments infrastructure on stablecoins, the floodgates will open for the complete tokenization of all financial assets, forever blurring the line between crypto and finance.
Onchain Rails Create New Economies. By digitizing physical assets on high-performance chains like Solana, you eliminate friction around custody, settlement, and global access, unlocking novel business models like the Gotcha Machine.
Real-World Logistics Are the Ultimate Moat. While anyone can build a smart contract, Collector Crypt’s defensibility comes from its physical supply chain—dealer relationships and automated acquisition tools that secure inventory below market price.
Novel Oracles Unlock the Next Wave of DeFi. The future of onchain finance depends on reliably pricing illiquid, real-world assets. Developing proprietary oracles, like Collector Crypt’s, is the first step to building DeFi for everything.
**De-Risk Your Alts.** Crypto is showing significant weakness by failing to rally with equities. Ethereum's lower high is a major red flag for the altcoin market; it's time to reduce leverage and concentrate into Bitcoin or cash.
**Hunt for Value in TradFi.** Traditional markets are offering powerful narrative-driven plays with crypto-like upside. Focus on assets like Tesla (robotics), Robinhood (gambling culture), and commodities like uranium (energy independence).
**Fade the ETF Narrative.** The institutional "sugar high" from ETFs is wearing off as the front-running trade becomes crowded and inflows wane. The market needs a new, more durable catalyst to move higher.
Subnets are becoming more complex. The introduction of sub-subnets will allow for more sophisticated, multi-faceted incentive mechanisms within a single subnet, effectively turning them into "mixtures of experts."
Performance is now paramount. Subnet deregistration creates a "perform or perish" dynamic. Underperforming subnets risk being automatically removed, with their assets returned to token holders as TAO.
Decentralization is on the horizon. The shift to Proof-of-Stake and a formal on-chain governance structure are actively being developed, marking a deliberate move toward placing control in the hands of the community.
