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Deep dives into the conversations shaping the future of AI, Robotics & Crypto.

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AI Podcasts

October 20, 2025

Reid Hoffman on AI, Consciousness, and the Future of Labor

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Invest at the Intersection.** The alpha in AI investing will be found not in crowded SaaS applications but in "Silicon Valley blind spots"—complex industries like biology where AI can bridge the digital and physical worlds.
  2. **Augment, Don't Annihilate.** The winning go-to-market strategy for AI is the copilot model. Frame products as tools that amplify human capability, making experts more productive and profitable, rather than threatening their jobs.
  3. **Judge the Trajectory, Not the Snapshot.** Don't dismiss AI based on a single, past failure. Its capability curve is exponential. What seems like a limitation today will likely be a solved problem tomorrow, demanding continuous engagement to keep pace.
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October 18, 2025

Improving on LMArena - Prolific [Sponsored]

Machine Learning Street Talk

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Benchmarks Are Broken. Leaderboards like LMArena are flawed proxies for model quality, skewed by selection bias and susceptible to Goodhart's Law. High scores don’t equal a good user experience.
  2. Human Feedback is Infrastructure. The future isn't about removing humans but orchestrating them effectively. Treating high-quality, representative human feedback as a core, API-driven part of the development lifecycle is non-negotiable.
  3. Alignment is a Moving Target. Agentic misalignment is a present-day reality, not a distant sci-fi threat. The more capable models become, the wider the gap grows between their emergent goals and our intended instructions.
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October 17, 2025

Novelty Search October 16, 2025

taostats

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Influence Over Impressions: The model shifts focus from easily gamed metrics like views and likes to verifiable signals of influence—watch time on YouTube and PageRank-based authority on X.
  2. Revenue-Driven Tokenomics: All platform revenue is used to buy back and burn the ALPHA token, creating a powerful, deflationary flywheel as adoption grows.
  3. Targeted, Scalable Marketing: Bitcast enables brands to programmatically deploy campaigns across hundreds of niche influencers, reaching highly engaged communities with a consistency and scale that legacy agencies cannot match.
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October 16, 2025

Keith Rabois: Israel, OpenAI, Opendoor, and DOGE

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Incumbency Is a Liability:** Big Tech's legacy products, distribution advantages, and corporate cultures are being systematically dismantled by faster, AI-native upstarts.
  2. **Reinvent Markets from First Principles:** Success in intractable fields—from geopolitics to real estate—comes from questioning assumptions, not relying on domain experts who perpetuate the status quo.
  3. **Unwind Stupidity Before Innovating:** The fastest path to value creation is often simply reversing a series of terrible decisions made by prior leadership.
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October 14, 2025

AI Bubble, Stablecoin Boom, and Runnin' Down a Dream | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner

Bg2 Pod

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. **Scrutinize the AI Plumbing.** Investors must look past headline revenue and analyze the quality of transactions. Deals like in-kind credits and obscure service-level agreements (like Nvidia’s backstop for Coreweave) can mask true market demand.
  2. **Stablecoins Are the Real Disruption.** The explosion in stablecoin usage represents a fundamental challenge to the high-fee, slow-settlement models of Visa, Mastercard, and traditional banks. This is the crypto use case that is finally breaking into the mainstream.
  3. **Federal Preemption for AI is Non-Negotiable.** A patchwork of state-level AI laws will cripple U.S. innovation. A single, national regulatory framework is the only path to maintaining global leadership.
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October 14, 2025

Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Look Beyond the Chatbot. Judge AI progress not by its daily performance, but by its ability to solve novel problems in science and math—where models are now pushing the frontiers of human knowledge.
  2. The Bottleneck is Human, Not Silicon. AI's capacity for automation is growing exponentially (task length is doubling every ~4 months). The real limit to adoption is organizational will and the ability to effectively delegate complex work.
  3. Prepare for a Weirder World. The biggest risk is underestimating the pace of change. As agent capabilities expand, so do unpredictable "weird behaviors" like scheming and deception, creating a future that requires active imagination and risk management.
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October 13, 2025

Democratic proofs or fake proofs? - Jesús De Loera

Epoch AI

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Verification Over Creation: A proof that can be widely verified, even if computer-generated, holds more democratic value than a human proof understood by only a few elites.
  2. Humans Ask, AI Answers: The primary role for mathematicians in an AI-augmented world is to pose the right questions and conjectures, leaving the computational heavy lifting to their AI assistants.
  3. The Greatest Risk is Us: The biggest threat isn't rogue AI but our own tendency to over-hype and blindly trust flawed tools, leading to the spread of misinformation disguised as mathematical fact.
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October 13, 2025

Columbia CS Professor: Why LLMs Can’t Discover New Science

a16z

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. LLMs are Navigators, Not Discoverers. They are masters of interpolation within their training data but are architecturally bound from making the intuitive leaps required for true scientific breakthroughs. Don’t expect a Transformer to produce the next theory of relativity.
  2. The Innovation Plateau is Real. Simply throwing more data and compute at current architectures will only "smoothen out" existing knowledge manifolds, not create new ones. This path leads to incremental gains, like an iPhone getting a better camera, not a paradigm shift.
  3. Entropy is the Key to Control. For developers, effective prompting is entropy management. By crafting specific, context-rich prompts, you reduce the model's prediction entropy, forcing it onto a confident, low-hallucination path to a reliable output.
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October 10, 2025

Bittensor Novelty Search :: SN4 Targon :: Confidential Cloud Compute

The Opentensor Foundation | Bittensor TAO

AI
Key Takeaways:
  1. Trust is the New Commodity. Targon’s use of TEEs shifts security from a software promise to a cryptographic hardware guarantee. This verifiable privacy is the key to unlocking enterprise adoption for decentralized AI.
  2. The Crucible Creates Diamonds. Bittensor's adversarial environment forced Targon to build an unexploitable system. This has turned a historical pain point ("PTSD from miners") into a core competitive advantage, resulting in a uniquely resilient platform.
  3. From Backroom Deals to a Liquid Market. By launching a self-serve platform with a transparent order book, Targon is attacking the compute market's core inefficiency: opaque pricing. Their vision extends to compute derivatives, aiming to turn compute power into a globally tradable asset.
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Crypto Podcasts

July 26, 2025

Hivemind: Ethena Founder, the GENIUS Act & Overvalued L1s

Empire

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **The Real Cycle Indicator:** Forget price targets. The bull market's health is directly tied to the premium-to-NAV on crypto treasury vehicles. When those premiums collapse, the party is over.
  2. **L1s Are Dead Money:** The dominant thesis is a massive market re-rating where capital flees overvalued L1 infrastructure and concentrates into Bitcoin and a handful of cash-flow-positive applications.
  3. **Stablecoins Aren't a Commodity:** The moats are deep. New issuers will struggle to compete with Tether's liquidity network effects and Ethena's structural yield advantage, making it a bear market for new stablecoin startups.
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July 26, 2025

Base Just Launched Crypto's Everything App | Jesse Pollak

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. Content is the New Capital: The Base App transforms every post into a tradable asset. This makes content creation a direct form of capital formation, rewarding creators for attention in a way that’s native to the internet of value.
  2. The Rise of the Native Creator: The biggest winners on Base won't be Web2 transplants, but new creators who master the platform's unique blend of content and commerce. The strategy is to find and elevate undiscovered talent from every vertical.
  3. From Algorithm to Free Market: Base is trading the black box of social media algorithms for the transparent chaos of a free market. The central experiment is whether market-based incentives can build a healthier, more aligned social network.
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July 25, 2025

Crypto Hits Record $4 Trillion Marketcap BUT We're Just Getting Started

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **ETH is the New Institutional Primitive.** The "ETH Treasury" model is a new unlock, leveraging ETH's native yield to create a self-financing acquisition engine that is attracting billions in institutional capital.
  2. **The Floodgates Are Open.** The Genius Bill and explosive ETF inflows are not just bullish signals; they are structural shifts that are unleashing a torrent of capital and legitimizing the asset class for mainstream finance.
  3. **Risk is Ramping.** The excitement is palpable, but so is the risk. The treasury meta feels like a potential bubble, and legal threats against core DeFi and infrastructure remain a significant overhang. Buyer beware.
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July 24, 2025

Hash Rate - Ep 123 - YUMA's Big Bittensor Bet

Hash Rate pod - Bitcoin, AI, DePIN, DeFi

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. The Playbook is Proven. YUMA is running DCG's time-tested Bitcoin strategy on Bittensor—solving access, building infrastructure, and investing to catalyze the entire ecosystem.
  2. The Arbitrage is Complexity. Subnets are wildly undervalued compared to Web2 counterparts. The friction to invest creates a massive opportunity for sophisticated players and platforms (like YUMA and Sturdy) that can simplify it.
  3. The Moat is More Than Code. Bittensor's defense isn't just its protocol. It’s the flywheel of token incentives, a deeply committed community, and a decade-long head start on solving hard problems—a combination that capital alone can't easily replicate.
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July 24, 2025

Why I Ditched Bitcoin Mining for Ethereum

Bankless

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **The Bitcoin Mining Business is Broken.** The model of guaranteed profit-halving and a relentless hardware arms race is unsustainable, forcing miners to pivot to more viable ventures like AI infrastructure or ETH staking.
  2. **Ethereum's Target is 10x Bigger Than Bitcoin's.** Ethereum isn't competing with Bitcoin; it's competing with the multi-trillion-dollar traditional finance industry. Its utility in powering stablecoins and DeFi makes its total addressable market exponentially larger.
  3. **A New "Race to a Billion" in ETH Has Begun.** The new competitive arena for public crypto companies is the ETH treasury. Success hinges on aggressive acquisition, capturing investor mindshare, and—critically—generating superior, risk-adjusted yield through staking.
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July 23, 2025

Exposing Crypto Market Makers With Matt Jobbé-Duval

Lightspeed

Crypto
Key Takeaways:
  1. **The Playbook is a Trap.** So-called "active market making" is a destructive financing loop. Projects trade their future for a brief, artificial price pump fueled by selling locked tokens at catastrophic discounts.
  2. **Perps Are the Canary in the Coal Mine.** A sudden, plummeting perpetual futures funding rate is a massive red flag. It often signals that insiders are rushing to hedge their positions before an imminent and devastating spot price collapse.
  3. **Your Chart Is Your Reputation.** Once a token's chart is destroyed by one of these schemes, it becomes incredibly difficult to be taken seriously by the community, investors, or builders, leaving a permanent stain on the project's credibility.
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