Invest in AI's Tailwinds: The essential question for any AI investment is: "Does this business get better as foundation models improve?" Companies fighting against the current of AI's scaling laws are on the wrong side of a powerful trade.
The "Mag 7" Will Expand, Not Just Turn Over: AI is not a zero-sum game for incumbents. The total addressable market is set to 10x as AI drives labor costs toward zero, creating room for a "Mag 25" and turning today's $500B companies into tomorrow's $5T behemoths.
Private Market Alpha Exists, But Edge is Paramount: The private AI market cap is a mere ~$700B, signaling massive growth potential. However, like in crypto, investors must be paranoid about their "edge," as the best deals require deep ecosystem access to avoid negative selection.
**AI Isn't a Feature; It's a New Infrastructure Primitive.** For the first time, developers are outsourcing logic, not just resources. This fundamentally changes how software is built, valued, and sold.
**Abandon Zero-Sum Thinking.** The AI market is in a massive expansion phase, not a consolidation battle. Value is accruing at every layer of the stack simultaneously; assuming one layer's gain is another's loss is a flawed thesis.
**The Future is More Developers, Not Fewer.** AI tools augment productivity and lower the barrier to entry. This elevates the developer's role to focus on product design and workflow definition—the *real* hard problem in software.
**A Killer Value Prop:** Chutes makes deploying powerful AI models 85% cheaper and as easy as building a website on Squarespace.
**The Investor's Dilemma:** While all revenue is used to buy back the Chutes alpha token, this currently covers only 10% of the daily token emissions. The token's price stability is heavily dependent on external market demand outstripping this inflation.
**Watch for Catalysts:** Two key events could dramatically increase buy pressure: the imminent launch of BitTensor subnet tokens on Solana and an anticipated wave of institutional capital from newly formed crypto hedge funds.
**Specialization Unlocks Performance.** ZEUS proves that a decentralized network of specialized AI agents can outperform monolithic, state-of-the-art models, achieving a nearly 40% lower error rate in weather forecasting.
**Revenue Sharing is the Next Evolution.** The plan to distribute API revenue directly to network participants in stablecoins represents a major step toward sustainable subnet economies, moving beyond token buybacks and emission-based rewards.
**The Valuation Gap is the Opportunity.** Despite massive potential, subnets have extremely low market caps compared to their Web2 equivalents. For long-term believers, this asymmetry presents a compelling, albeit early, investment thesis.
Human Intelligence is the Ultimate Moat: In an era of synthetic data, Dojo is creating a defensible moat by generating proprietary, high-quality human preference data. This is the raw material for the next generation of fine-tuned, specialized models.
A New Paradigm for Validation: Dojo’s mechanism of using subtle "perturbations" to test labelers is a breakthrough. It solves the cold start problem of validating subjective human feedback in a decentralized network.
The Future is Human-Agentic Collaboration: Dojo is evolving from a data-generation subnet to a platform for human-agentic workflows, with applications in robotics, video analytics, and 3D generation. In the long term, it aims to be a crucial tool for aligning AI with human values.
Your Pricing Model Is Now a Dynamic Weapon. The five-year pricing plan is dead. You must build the infrastructure and culture for constant experimentation and rapid iteration. If you’re not re-evaluating your model quarterly, you're falling behind.
This Is a CEO-Level Mandate. Shifting to usage-based pricing is a full-company transformation that requires top-down vision. The CEO must act as the "pricing dictator" to align sales, product, and finance around a unified strategy of value creation and capture.
Your Product Team Now Owns Revenue. In a usage-based world, the core value metric *is* your revenue. Product and engineering teams must become obsessed with driving the specific usage that customers pay for, making their impact on the bottom line completely objective.
AI as a System, Not a Tool: Advanced AI art projects are not just prompt-driven tools but autonomous systems. They use feedback loops (DAOs, user interaction) to develop their own "taste" and creative trajectory, aiming for a level of agency beyond simple human puppeteering.
AI Reveals Human Vulnerabilities: AI companions act as a social mirror, showing that humans fundamentally crave connection and non-judgmental spaces. We are turning to AI to fulfill core needs that are often unmet in our human-to-human relationships.
The Artist's Dilemma: Adapt or Perish: Resisting AI is becoming a losing battle. The future for artists isn't about competing with AI on replication but on finding what AI can't do, critiquing it from within, or carving out a niche for "100% human-made" work in a world of synthetic media.
Benchmarks are broken. The ML community can no longer rely on leaderboards as a proxy for truth. The new frontier is developing robust, qualitative explanations for why models succeed or fail.
Embrace the illusion. The most effective models aren’t finding universal laws but are constructing powerful, computationally efficient illusions of them. Progress lies in refining these illusions, not in a futile search for Platonic perfection.
Think like a physicist. The future of foundational AI research is to treat models as complex physical systems. The task is to design parametric models where stochastic processes, like SGD, can efficiently "relax" into a state that approximates the data distribution.
**Incumbent Advantage is Real:** Existing SAS companies with API-first platforms and deep domain knowledge are well-positioned to leverage AI as a TAM-expanding, sustaining innovation.
**Startups Should Hunt Greenfields:** The biggest disruption will happen in unstructured industries (legal, healthcare) that were previously resistant to software. This is where new, AI-native giants will be born.
**The New Bottleneck is Human:** The speed of AI adoption is no longer limited by technology, but by the organization's ability to adapt its workflows and people. The most valuable skill is now managing agents, not just tasks.
Tariff Truce is Tactical: The 90-day US-China tariff pause offers temporary relief, but the underlying trade war isn't over; expect continued market sensitivity to policy shifts.
Bitcoin's Macro Moment: Bitcoin's strong performance amidst geopolitical and economic uncertainty solidifies its narrative as a non-sovereign store of value and a crucial portfolio diversifier.
Crypto Regs on Horizon: Despite DC's legislative snags, the potent combination of crypto industry lobbying and perceived national benefits (like stablecoins aiding deficit financing) makes eventual regulation highly probable.
Apps Over Infra: The investment pendulum is swinging decisively towards applications that can onboard millions and generate real revenue, marking a shift from the "fat protocol" to the "fat app" era.
Ecosystems are King: Choice of blockchain (Solana, Base leading for consumer) is critical; building on unproven chains is a gamble few startups can afford. Expect consolidation.
Revenue & Vision Rule: Success stories like Pump.fun highlight that agile teams with a broad vision beyond niche crypto use cases (and real revenue) will capture significant market share.
Performance First, Decentralization Follows: L1s that prioritize and achieve superior performance will attract the most activity, leading to higher revenues and, consequently, a greater number of incentivized, decentralized validators.
Profit Over Philanthropy: Forget "running a node for the cause"; long-term decentralization hinges on validators earning more than they spend. Net income is king.
Solana's Uncapped Potential: Solana's design aims to break the mold by enabling an ever-increasing number of validators without sacrificing its high-speed performance, offering a path to maximal decentralization.
**Red Flag Deals:** "Profit-share dump" incentives, as seen with Movement, are distinct from standard, healthier market maker compensation and warrant extreme investor caution.
**Transparency is Non-Negotiable:** Public disclosure of market maker terms (loan size, strike prices) is crucial for informed retail decision-making and market integrity.
**Vet Your Visionaries:** For investors, a team's hyper-focus on marketing over demonstrable tech, coupled with opaque dealings like Movement's, are significant red flags; demand substance over hype.
Efficiency Isn't Centralization: Rapid, coordinated responses to network threats are signs of a healthy, aligned ecosystem, not inherent centralization.
L1 Scaling is a Grind: Ethereum's path to a more performant L1 is fraught with technical challenges and competitive pressure, with no guarantee of reclaiming its past dominance in on-chain activity.
Performance Pays for Decentralization: The L1s that can deliver sustained high performance will attract activity and revenue, creating the strongest economic incentives for a truly decentralized validator set.
The crypto space is witnessing an intense period of building and institutional adoption, fundamentally reshaping financial infrastructure.
Real-World Integration Accelerates: Major players like Coinbase and Stripe are not just dipping toes but diving headfirst, embedding crypto into mainstream finance and global commerce.
Stablecoins are the New Global Rails: With Stripe's expansion and the US Treasury's bullish $2T forecast, stablecoins are becoming indispensable for borderless, efficient payments.
On-Chain Capital Markets Are Here: The tokenization of real-world assets, particularly equities via platforms like Superstate, is paving the way for more liquid, accessible, and programmable financial markets.
