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- [00:00]
Alex
If you like the AI coding tools you have today, you're going to like them a whole lot more down the road.
- [00:05]
Chris Zakaria
As well as being hyper competitive, Bittense is also extremely cooperative.
- [00:09]
Alex
How much money do you need to raise to put together a compelling subnet pitch pre launch?
- [00:16]
Chris Zakaria
It's less about the amount as a fixed total, it's more about validation. You might be an amazing ML engineer, you might be an incredible full stack device, but Bittense is adversarial and the miners are like very, very intense. They're going to tell you apart. You could get wiped out and lose your initial capital.
- [00:36]
Alex
This race is going to yield a lot of steel on steel sharpening as we say.
- [00:41]
Chris Zakaria
We actually have some news that we want to break right here on this Week in Startups with you guys.
- [00:45]
Alex
All right, this Week in Startups is brought to you by Notion. Bring all your notes, docs and projects into one space that just works with AI built right in. Just try Notion with notion agent@notion.com twist grasshopper bank time is money. Don't waste either. Go to Grasshopper Bank Twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account and LinkedIn jobs hire right the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post@LinkedIn.com twist. Hello and welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. I'm joined today by my dear friend Lon Harris. Lon, how are you doing?
- [01:29]
Lon Harris
Great. Happy to be here.
- [01:31]
Alex
All right, April 22, 2026 or as we say here at Twist, AO86 how many days it's been.
- [01:38]
Lon Harris
That's what we say when we, when we remember to say 80. We're, we're almost at the exact three month open claw point and I feel like open claw mania is dying down. That's how I feel.
- [01:49]
Alex
Dying down a little bit. Hermes agent is doing quite well. People are talking about cowork. But I will say, and we're going to get to this at the end of the show. There are some really awesome open weight models that have come out that are incredibly price and intelligence efficient lawn. So people might want to take a second look at OpenCloth. But on the show today we're talking SpaceX and cursor. The biggest deal in the news in the last six months, I want to say. And then we have a couple of folks from the realm of Bitcoin Tensor, we have the folks from bitstarter. And then we're going to talk to the people behind subnet 11. That's Ning Ren. It's going to be an absolute bop.
- [02:22]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [02:22]
Alex
Balon, break down for us the the headlines here of the big XAI SpaceX news.
- [02:27]
Lon Harris
Well, I think first we should give a shout out to our good friends at Plot. I don't have my plot. It's the first time I've made it on the show. I feel naked. My plug pit is over there on the desk and I'm not going to interrupt the show to go right over to get it. But plot, folks, incredible technology. We all have a note pin, I have the note s pen. And what's so amazing about it is that it will. It works in the background. You just hit the button, it starts recording. It puts a little the little light on so everybody around you can see your recording. It's not. This is not a spy camera technology. And it not only records notes from you while you're going about your day, bits of the conversation, whoever you're talking to, but it sort of organizes them thoughtfully. It's got that AI powered brain. So it's not just, you know, transcribing everything you hear in a big block of text. It's giving you the context, everything you need to go back, search through what was being said, find the nugget of information that you need. It's really like having a, you know, second brain that you could store things in if you are a little forgetful, like myself.
- [03:28]
Alex
Yeah, it's critical for me to not forget things. Also, mine is currently charging because I use it all the time. I forgot to take it off the charger and put it back on for the show.
- [03:36]
Lon Harris
That's the message. But evidence is we're both using our plod pins so much that we're having trouble getting them together for the show because they're in use currently, folks, and
- [03:45]
Alex
they actually have really great battery life. So I think this is more just you and I being disorganized. But if you want to get your own plod notepen s, you can go to plod. AI p, l, a u d dot, AI slash, twist. Use the code twist. Save 10%. Stop forgetting things. Take excellent notes. Put AI to work for you. Plod. We love them. Thanks, guys, for sponsoring the show.
- [04:03]
Lon Harris
As J.K. says, we applaud Plod.
- [04:05]
Alex
Back to the news.
- [04:05]
Lon Harris
SpaceX.
- [04:06]
Alex
SpaceX.
- [04:06]
Lon Harris
Yes. So the big news yesterday, everybody freaked out in the afternoon. It was like right after we recorded another show and it was like, so we'll talk about it now. SpaceX and Cursor are partnering on AI models. Of course, Cursor, the popular AI coding model and harness company. They're going to work together to create and I quote, the world's best coding and knowledge work AI as a team or as Cursor put it, we're partnering with SpaceX to improve co Composer. So the idea is that it's sort of a collaboration, but it's also sort of an early announcement of a potential acquisition. SpaceX is going to either pay Cursor $10 billion for this model collaboration that they're working on, or they're going to, at the end of designing this model, just buy cursor out for $60 billion by the end of 2026 at some point. So it's an interesting, like the original announcements were all like SpaceX buying and like maybe at one point they're sort of trial running it for the next few months.
- [05:10]
Alex
So why does this deal make sense from a headline perspective? It's pretty simple. Cursor has done a very good job competing with Codex from OpenAI and also Claude Code from Anthropic as those two coding products, LAN have become really the de facto of the industry. Cursor has continued to grow. It's reached I think, 2 billion in annualized run rate as of earlier this year. A very impressive number. And I would say most Critically, they released Composer 2, which is their latest model that they built for themselves. It was announced a couple of weeks back and it does seem to perform quite well against industry standard benchmarks. That is, it's competitive with the models from the best companies.
- [05:47]
Chris Zakaria
Yes.
- [05:48]
Alex
All right, so why does that matter if you're Xai, which is now part of SpaceX? Well, Xai had a really big hit coding model called GROK Code Fast one. It was incredibly cheap, it was incredibly quick, everyone used it, it took over Open Router for a while, but since then the company has not been at the tip of the spear, as we might say in the AI coding game. So what does XAI have a lot of compute? What does Cursor have? A model that's quite good and the chops to make more. You put the two together, you take xai's GPU clusters and Composers AI model making skills and in theory, Lon, it's a match made in heaven.
- [06:24]
Lon Harris
Yeah, well, I mean we've seen so much discussion just in the last few weeks. There's more in the docket about this, about how every one of these companies now feels like they need their own AI coding product that's locked in, that's best in class. Like that's what's driving so much of this industry. Everybody again, as you said, trying to compete with the Claude codes of the world, the Codexes of the world. We had that Google all hands red alert from Sergey Brin the other day. He's basically saying the same thing like, where are we? Why isn't Gemini best of class and the thing every developer is using. So I think it's interesting sort of looking at it from outside that, that particular tool that that form function of the AI coding assistant has become essentially what's driving the entire AI industry at this point.
- [07:11]
Alex
Absolutely. Here is the benchmarks that Cursor put up when they put out Composer 2, their recent model. And as you can see if you're on the audio version, it's basically a little bit behind GPT 5.4, but it's ahead of Opus 4.6, 4.5 and Composer 1.5. Of course, the preceding generation, this was
- [07:26]
Lon Harris
not updated for 4.7 though. How dare they.
- [07:29]
Alex
No, no, it's, it's not, it's, it's not our fault. That anthropic's been cooking quite a lot in Cursors.
- [07:34]
Lon Harris
Those teens in Discord who are already using Mythos, I hope they can tell us how that stacks up. I don't know if you followed that story.
- [07:41]
Alex
Oh, yeah, we'll get through that. But the other thing that's really important here is that Cursor has a lot of developer market share.
- [07:47]
Lon Harris
Yes.
- [07:48]
Alex
And what that unlocks for the company is a lot of information about how people are using its models in a production environment. You can learn from the logs, the traces, call it what you will. There is an opt out built into how Cursor functions, Lon. So you can't just expect them to have every piece of data from every single user or customer. But probably there's enough people opting in to share that they have a pretty good corpus of information on a day to day basis. So XAI doesn't have that because their coding models have not been as well received as those from other companies. So data and models from Cursor and then a lot of Compute from XAI Space X. I think that there's two prices here that are different. So the $10 billion number is very expensive, like to partner with a company to work on for a single product.
- [08:34]
Lon Harris
If you're like, we got this new model out of it, we really love it. Like 10.10B nuts is a big number.
- [08:39]
Alex
Yeah, 10 peanuts is a big number. And we don't know exactly how costs will be shared. You know, is Cursor going to pay for some of the power bill over at Xai's Colossus Supercomputers or not. But $60 billion is not a large number because as we've seen recently, Cursor is considering raising capital today at a $50 billion.
- [08:57]
Lon Harris
Right. And so to the end of the year, presumably you would be well above the 60 billion. So theoretically SpaceX could be getting a little bit of a discount on that by where we expect Cursor to be in December.
- [09:07]
Alex
Absolutely. So it's kind of a call option on buying Cursor. Yeah, it's a big old, big old call option. So the risk that I would say SpaceX XAA are taking is what if this partnership doesn't bear the fruit they're hoping it does, and they're still on the hook for $10 billion.
- [09:25]
Lon Harris
Right. I can have one other financial question, and I look to you, Alex, as somebody who's a little bit smarter about this than me. We also have been hearing a whole lot about a SpaceX IPO in the imminent future. Is there a chance that this is narrative in some way? That this is part of the storytelling as we go into the ipo? Like, look at these massive deals. Maybe if you were a little skeptical about XAI because of the model situation. Well, now you have this very reassuring news that they're going to be teaming with one of the leaders in that space and so forth.
- [09:57]
LinkedIn Host
Yeah, hiring can be its own full time job. And hey, guess what? I already have a full time job. I make podcasts and I invest. But when you're running a small company, we both know every hire matters. You don't want to waste any of the seats you have at your company. And the best partner you can have is LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Why? There's a billion people using LinkedIn. All the great, great talent are there. If you're proud of your work, you build a LinkedIn page and you update it. LinkedIn Hiring Pro is going to streamline and simplify the entire process for you. Nearly 60% of companies using LinkedIn Hiring Pro. You're going to get an incredible candidate to interview in the first week. And you know we're looking for a new producer for the pod. We did shout outs here on the show. We posted it on my social media. We asked friends, you know, where we found our Next Great hire, LinkedIn. And it was competitive. We had like three or four really good choices. So hire right the first time, post your first job and get $100 off towards your post@LinkedIn.com hiringpro offer. That's LinkedIn.com hiring pro offer. Terms and conditions apply.
- [10:58]
Alex
So SpaceX going public by itself is a two part business. It's a launch company and it's also a satellite Internet company. And the latter half of that's been very, very profitable for SpaceX based on what?
- [11:09]
Lon Harris
AI and X. I mean that's also sort of part and part and then,
- [11:14]
Alex
then you have the other two things. XAI nx as you said, X. Let's just go ahead and say it's breakeven, probably somewhere in and around that or the losses or profits from it are not really material compared to the scale of Space Launch Starlink and xai. But the problem is XAI brings a lot of costs with it. It brings, I think, a little bit of debt. It spends a lot of money on GPUs. It is not cheap to build essentially overnight one of the world's largest compute clusters. So if you're an investor looking at this kind of Elon conglomerate, if you will, there are some clear financial winners today and there are some bets that may pay off later on, but you're going to pay for those bets now. So I think you're dead on. This is a way to change the narrative a little bit. XAI is not merely the third or fourth place company in the current AI model game. It is now the partner, potential owner of Cursor, a multibillion dollar revenue company that has a lot more developer mindshare. So it does, I think, ameliorate some concerns. But it's doing so at the cost of 10 or 60 billion dollars. And we don't know long today if those sums are predicated on cash, stock or a mix. Because it could either be debt you have to raise, cash you have to burn, or shares you have to issue or a combination.
- [12:24]
Lon Harris
As is so often in the AI industry. It's sort of purely theoretical at this point. We could talk about it, it's on paper, but it's not really anything concrete that we can sort of look at the, look at the numbers and break down at this point. It's a promise.
- [12:39]
Alex
I also, it is, it is a promise. But I do think that when you're thinking about the size of the prize, it's worth taking some expensive swings. And so the reason why I'm not shouting about the $10 billion fee essentially is because I do think that if you get very good at writing AI, creating AI models that can do coding, you're much closer to recursive self improvement, which is when an AI model can work on itself and improve itself. So right now I think we consider the cursors and the CLAUDE codes of the world as individual accelerants for developers and development teams. But if you want to build the AI model that can improve itself long term, you're going to need to have at a minimum state of the art coding shops, if not the market leading option. And XAI just isn't there.
- [13:27]
Chris Zakaria
Right?
- [13:27]
Alex
So a way to turn the page.
- [13:29]
Lon Harris
It's that flywheel, it's that the more developers that are using it to code, the more data you're getting, getting about good coding, the better the model becomes. And so, and so as we look to potentially AGI or models that can write brilliant, beautiful code without a human in the loop ever, whoever has the most data theoretically wins.
- [13:49]
Alex
And then there's the, the future component to this. Here's a tweet from Jason, who's out today. He'll be back later on, don't worry, he's not off the show, just off for today.
- [13:57]
Lon Harris
We kicked him off.
- [13:58]
Alex
He said, I mean everyone gets a day off.
- [14:01]
Lon Harris
Takeover, folks. Hostile takeover.
- [14:03]
Alex
So Jason says, fire emoji. Wow. Very strategic and bold move. Colossus, which is the XAI supercomputer, is a super weapon for SpaceX already. Can you imagine when it scales to the stars? So the other part of this is, let's say you do get, let's say, let's just say xai buys cursor, SpaceX buys cursor, the experiment works out, they take all that data and learning and model prowess and they make something fantastic. Okay, then what? Right now XAI has, I think, the only example of compute glut in the AI game. But if they make a model that is as good as they hope, that's going to become a compute shortage overnight
- [14:38]
Lon Harris
as it switches over from the clods of the world to the groks of the world and then all of a sudden they're at the center of everything.
- [14:46]
Alex
But today, Anthropic is throttling, blocking, turning people off, trying to just keep itself online. GitHub Copilot stopped signing up new individual paid accounts to hold back compute. Everyone's struggling.
- [14:59]
Lon Harris
I'm not even doing writing code, I'm like doing tweets and Claude is like, hang on brother, I need a break. Give me 45 minutes. And I'm not taking apart our back end or anything.
- [15:11]
Alex
But if you do believe that SpaceX has a chance at building orbital data centers, which we've Talked about via StarCloud, the Twist 500 company, then you can kind of sketch out a future in which they have the best coding model and the most compute.
- [15:24]
Lon Harris
Right? Which is a lot of clearly that's Elon's vision as we become a. You know, I forget what the, what the Russian name is like. As we pursue becoming a various higher level civilization and powering our data centers directly from the sun, obviously we would need to have the best compute and the best models in space. We're trying to become a Kardashev Level 2 civilization.
- [15:46]
Alex
And if you don't know what that means, you are not spending enough time reading science fiction. Fix that. This is a data set from Open Router and what it shows is the most popular coding models. I think this is the last week, maybe the last day. But Lon, if you take a look at this, you see some open models from folks like Moonshot, which is Chinese Minimax, Chinese step one, Chinese Nvidia, Anthropic OpenAI and that's it. And so I think that this is probably the fire they're trying to put out. They have to get back on this board. They have to become competitive. And so maybe a $10 billion bet for a company that's supposed to be worth 1.25 trillion is. And this is an odd thing to say. It's, it's pocket change. It's not that much money in that context. It's three MLB teams. I guess given the recent sale price,
- [16:31]
Lon Harris
still a lot of money. But yes, in perspective of what these companies are doing, it might make more sense.
- [16:37]
Alex
Well, no matter what, I think the takeaway for folks out there is that if you like the AI coding tools you have today, you're going to like them a whole lot more down the road. Because Lord above, there is more improvement coming. This race is going to yield a lot of steel on steel sharpening, as we say. And I think it's going to turn everyone into, I mean, just superhuman development. I can't wait.
- [16:57]
Lon Harris
We're already seeing it. I mean these, these products are coming out at an insane, insanely rapid rate. Openclaw, I feel like, is updated every other day. There's a new version. So yeah, like the, the drive to become the new Claude code is massive and incredibly intense as, as intense as any race I think we've seen in tech since I've been following it.
- [17:18]
Alex
In fact, you know, Lon, why don't we talk to a couple of folks from the world of Bittensor and see what AI coding model and harness they are using. I would love to I want to bring up here to the stage our dear friends Chris zakaria and Brian McCrindle from bit starter, and they are in the Gen Z Hype House podcast studio with mood lighting. Boys, welcome to the show.
- [17:40]
Lon Harris
Look at that.
- [17:40]
Chris Zakaria
Thank you very much. Great to be here.
- [17:42]
Alex
Yeah.
- [17:42]
Brian McCrindle
Doesn't it look beautiful?
- [17:43]
Lon Harris
It does. What does orange lighting signify? What mood is that?
- [17:49]
Chris Zakaria
Our logo is orange. So actually it looks like we set it up this way, but that was pure chalk.
- [17:54]
Lon Harris
Completely. I feel like it's calming. It's giving me. It's giving me a calming, soothing vibe.
- [17:59]
Alex
I was getting Halloween vibes. But listen, guys, before we get into what bitstarter does, I'm curious, for your own development work for the company, what are you guys using these days?
- [18:08]
Chris Zakaria
You mean in terms of AI tools?
- [18:10]
Alex
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:11]
Chris Zakaria
Opus 4. 7 tooled up to the max code and cowork 24. 7.
- [18:17]
Lon Harris
They're tokenizing. Alex.
- [18:20]
Brian McCrindle
I'm like, I'm like, consistently on like three instances of cloud code and composer and like, making them fight against each other.
- [18:26]
Ning Ren
Wow.
- [18:27]
Alex
Oh, wow.
- [18:28]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [18:29]
Alex
So what would it take for you guys to swap out your anthropic and composer models for something from xai? Like, how much better would they have to get vis the starting story of the show?
- [18:41]
Chris Zakaria
Oh, well, Brian's the founding engineer, so I think that's one for you.
- [18:45]
Brian McCrindle
Yeah, Honestly, for me, it's always just like, ease of use in the sense of like, whatever. One of the most valuable things is not impeding someone's workflow. Like, I wouldn't want to go have to download another tool that's not clean based or something that's, you know, isn't clearly better. Like, there's a bunch of people who are, like, at the edge of everything and they want to use absolutely every single tool. But that's not the vast majority of engineers. Right. It just needs to be known to be the best. I need to see it on the leaderboards. I need to see it on, on places like arena, if you guys know where. Arena lm. Arena.
- [19:12]
Alex
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
- [19:13]
Brian McCrindle
You know, it just needs to be like, I think there was a whole push for cloud code and it was very, very clear that it was the best. And then I moved over and said, yep, that's. That's obvious.
- [19:21]
Alex
I have some arena data here for anyone curious. So this is a. A rundown of the leading AI labs in the coding context, grouped. And so the current leaderboard is anthropic. Then Z AI, the Chinese company behind the really solid GLM 5.1 model, Alibaba, with the Quinn family. OpenAI, of course. GPT 5.4, Codex, Google, Moonshot, Xiaomi, Minimax, then Xai, then deep seats. That's the top 10 in the world today. Kind of a shocking list. A lot of Chinese companies, they're doing quite well. I'm encouraged by that. But, guys, let's talk about bitstarter. So we have been going deep in the world of Bittensor. I have talked to so many subnets, we've learned so much and it's been an absolute treat to see how the economics function. But you guys have put together kind of an on ramp, if you will, to BitTensor via Bitstarter, which you guys kind of called the Kickstarter program. So what we want to know is why couldn't we use Kickstarter for this? Why do we?
- [20:20]
Lon Harris
Is there, yeah, is there something in the Kickstarter rules? It's like no subnets.
- [20:24]
LinkedIn Host
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- [21:24]
Chris Zakaria
I'd love to see someone try. And maybe that should have been the prototype, but for a decentralized network, Bittensor's launches back, say a year ago were really opaque and had an information asymmetry where it was investors who were in the know who could decide whether or not a team got launched and it was retail chasing after. Once the subnet had already gone to the protocol and was already pumping. So that was one big reason why we wanted to create a system whereby, hey, what if we could launch teams together in a Distributed way and give retail the same chance as investors get the same OTC style terms that you'd normally only get if you're an investor in return for crowdfunding a team to the protocol and getting them over that initial investment hump and building on Bittensor.
- [22:16]
Alex
Okay, so it's kind of community, it's kind of being a purpose driven product in terms of does one thing very well. I guess my question is how much money do you need to raise to put together a compelling subnet pitch pre launch and then is that raised in USD a stable or tao?
- [22:39]
Chris Zakaria
Right.
- [22:39]
Alex
Which is the Bittensor token, if you didn't know.
- [22:41]
Chris Zakaria
Great question. So it's less about the amount as a fixed total, it's more about validation. And what I mean by that is would this actually work on Bittensor? You might be an amazing ML engineer, you might be an incredible full stack dev, but Bittensor is different. It's adversarial. You're designing for a game theoretic AI environment and the miners are like very, very intense. They're going to tell you apart. So you might think you've got an amazing business idea and a great white paper, you've got the GitHub repo. But if you don't validate that it's going to work in a distributed adversarial system, then it's more like you could get wiped out and lose your initial capital. Right. So yeah, go ahead, Alex.
- [23:26]
Alex
Well, the reason why I like this lawn is that it sets up a way to kind of screen out the crap and then therefore allows people to have more confidence in both backing new subnets but also investing in the ones that have already made it. But here's the thing, it doesn't feel super decentralized to need bespoke on ramps, if that makes sense. So tell me, tell me if I'm being overly precious here, but it does seem like when I talk to folks in the realm of Bittensor, we talk about community and kind of caring for the ecosystem, which is all well and good, but it sounds a bit more like a gardener pruning a tree than letting a forest grow wild.
- [24:05]
Chris Zakaria
Well, I want to get Brian's take on this as well, but my take on it would be Bittensor. Alex is absolutely right. It's meant to be that way. It's meant to be super competitive. Right. But Bittensors also, as well as being hyper competitive, it's also extremely cooperative in that there's a lot of like cross pollination, there's a lot of openness between the teams. And there's a lot of collaboration there too. Right? There's a lot of like shared resources. We go to the same conferences, people know each other. And it's the combination of the two, it's the integration of competition and collaboration that really succeeds. The thing that was getting me about the, about launches was that because the funding to get the subnet slot was really concentrated in about maybe four different types of investors, a subnet slot can cost say quarter of a million dollars, maybe more in tao, and that's burnt now. So that's, that's a sunk cost. So if you have to go to investors to say, hey, can you give me that initial startup capital so I can get a subnet, their terms are often like, okay, we'll give it to you, we'll give you that initial 100K, but you have to give us 20% of emissions in perpetuity. And then suddenly you get like a small group of investors owning like 80% of the teams on the protocol. Hence, hey, what if we crowdfunded it? That way you don't have these investors who have to put up that first quarter of a mil and the teams aren't weighed down by having to give away 20, 30% of their emissions forever, which means less to spend on it.
- [25:32]
Alex
Yeah, that's an insane cut.
- [25:34]
Lon Harris
There are only like 128, I believe, subnets in total. So how competitive is it for each of those slots? Is there like a long waiting list for like some company has to go out of business for you to take over the subnet? Like, what, what is that marketplace like?
- [25:50]
Brian McCrindle
Yeah, I mean, there definitely is a process of like subnet deregistration.
- [25:54]
Chris Zakaria
Right.
- [25:55]
Brian McCrindle
So you know, there needs to be. There is like people have been deregistered in the past. Sorry about that. People have been deregistered in the past, but really when it comes down to it is that like, you know, the competitiveness comes down to like the price of actually registering a slot fluctuates. It's not a fixed cost.
- [26:13]
Chris Zakaria
Right.
- [26:13]
Brian McCrindle
It's this dynamic number that changes. Like if I register. Okay, well it's going to double the next time someone else wants to register. So there's like a market value to registering and it becomes basically like, can you register something before somebody else at a certain amount of money and if you need that amount of capital.
- [26:28]
Alex
Yeah. So it's a bit like the sports franchise model. Like there's a new NWSL team, they had to pay a $205 million fee to join a limited number of teams. So you're kind of buying, you know, the, the Boston basketball team equivalent slot as part of the Bittensor subnet group.
- [26:45]
Chris Zakaria
Exactly. And some slots have more liquidity than others. So one of the first subnets, if you get say, you know, one of the first 20 or 40 subnets, it will probably have a lot more alpha in it than a subnet that was registered later. So handshake 58, what you're on now? This is on subnet 58. This slot has a lot more alpha on it than say subnet 120. So that means more liquidity, which means more capital to spend upfront on the things that you need. So there's also competition there.
- [27:17]
Alex
Why does it have more alpha? I thought alpha tokens were the, the subsidiary tokens on a per subnet basis that were used to incentivize the miners and validators. I didn't know that they were. That they varied in quantity based on subnet number. Like I'm missing something here.
- [27:29]
Chris Zakaria
It's when they were registered, they start emitting alpha. So some of them got registered over a year ago. So they've emitted more in that time. They all have the same fixed total.
- [27:37]
Alex
Yeah, there's always a new corner in Bittensor land for me to look around and go, I didn't know that.
- [27:42]
Chris Zakaria
Well, can you imagine starting a subnet, Alex, and not knowing this stuff and then being like, wait, hold on a minute.
- [27:47]
Alex
What?
- [27:48]
Brian McCrindle
I think there's, there's like some really strong intrinsic value to what bitstarter is trying to do. Right. Like there's, you know, so I, I primarily work at macrocosmos. You guys have had Will and Stefan on here in the past. Great folks and just learning how to go through the process of creating a subnet and doing everything from two years ago, like when there was almost nobody in the ecosystem and people knew and like. But there's a lot of tribal knowledge. Like bitstarter was like the very first really official initiative that was trying to give back to the community and say, okay, there's this whole treasure trove of information that you need. Like you need to go from zero to one really, really fast and that's how you're going to be successful.
- [28:26]
Alex
Yeah. So you guys add credibility and guidance. But also I feel like if a subnet goes through bitstarter, given your guys place inside the ecosystem, it's a really big stamp of approval. It's cred, essentially.
- [28:37]
Chris Zakaria
Instantly we try and bring together a mixture of experts of the best people on the protocol to give free discretionary advice to the applications that come in, the ones that pass our initial review. We help them build up their proposal, we then share it with a cross section of the ecosystem. People have run validators miners. Jacob, the co founder of Bittensor, is on the advisory panel and it's through their advice and their commentary that helps improve the application. If you're a subnet, a prospective subnet owner, you don't have to take their advice, but it means that lots of senior people in the protocol have had a chance to help you if you want it. And then even if not, you get to pitch it live on air through our show so that you can find your people. And at the beginning it can be really hard to get attention on your subnet. Like Lon said, there are 128 of them. So by starting out by you've got the best people in the protocol looking it over, you've got backing from people who've built it before to improve your proposal and then you go live on air with a crowdfund behind you. We've gotten up to 2,000 people before. It was like the second most watched show on Bittensor after Novelty Search, which Jacob posts. So you get a chance to find your people, make your case, and then hit the ground running.
- [30:01]
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- [31:16]
Lon Harris
I mean you've run a lot of these competitions now, or a lot of these sort of projects Are there certain kinds of projects or certain kinds of pitches that get everybody's attention and sort of do better naturally on the system? Like, I know Kickstarter always worked that way. People are always like, oh, you got to put like a horror short. The horror does great over there. You know that kind of stuff.
- [31:33]
Ning Ren
Right.
- [31:34]
Chris Zakaria
That's the exciting thing, is that what are the parameters? What are the best startups for building on distributed systems? What does a community like Bittensor really respond to? What turns them on? And a lot of it actually comes down to the founders and the founding team. And there was a team we launched back in January. We did it live from Davos and no one had heard of them. They'd been in stealth mode. They were two tenured professors from an east coast university and then the other one has a chair at Harvard in philosophy, and they also have an AI podcast and run a hedge fund. And they had a business already built and launched in the same sector that they were going to build the subnet in. And that we completed their raise in under an hour. That was 600 tau. So that when you have great founders, no one's heard of them, there's this element of like, surprise. We dial people in from different parts of Bittensor to give their perspective. That can be great. But long term, what you're looking for is what are the types of problems that are best solved on a distributed system and what do they need to succeed when they hit the protocol. There's the liquidity pool management, there's the social media aspect, there are managing the miners and the validators. So it's a really complex entity. We're tracking every team we launch so we can learn as we go what really leads to success.
- [32:48]
Lon Harris
It's a little bit like Subnet University. It's a little bit like for founders, but for. For people specifically in subnets. That's what it makes me think.
- [32:57]
Alex
But you know, if Jason gives you money, he gets stock in return. So I'm curious. Bitstarter as a project makes sense to me now. Really appreciate the explanation. Is it designed to be a revenue generating business or is it more a community arm of the Bittensor folks to help get people onto subnets that are being either misused or Underused?
- [33:17]
Chris Zakaria
We take 3% of emissions for the first 90 days after they get to post launch. That's a lot smaller than what a lot of other incubators take. But our mission was to build Bittensor better. I know that actually subnet owners only get 18% of total emissions because 41% goes to miners, 41% goes to validators. If you take more than that. Right. What tends to happen is that they don't have as much disposable capital to spend on things like recruitment or infrastructure, which means that they tend to struggle a bit more when they get to mainnet. Whereas my gamble was, well, if we take less from them and we bring in more partners at the start, they can spend the money on the partnerships that will help them to thrive. They'll be less weighed down by someone taking passive income from them.
- [34:03]
Brian McCrindle
Yeah, and I think there's also a big, a big bet in there too, right. Where you're, you're investing in them taking less with. With the hope that their alpha also appreciates.
- [34:12]
Chris Zakaria
Right.
- [34:12]
Brian McCrindle
Like you want them to be successful, you want them to go through the whole process of like, being, creating something state of the art, creating something that's going to change a bit tense or, or change technology in some way, because
- [34:23]
Chris Zakaria
then the relative value of that 3% is way higher.
- [34:25]
Alex
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's kind of staggering that people would want to take 20 or 30% of emissions in perpetuity and you're taking 3% for 90 days is how do the economics work out on your end? Because that could be a smaller sum of money if those tokens don't appreciate greatly in the future. So are you willing to just kind of eat the work just for the sake of the network's overall health?
- [34:50]
Chris Zakaria
At the beginning, it was really important to prove that this works. No one ever tried this on Bittensor before. You're pledging TAO for future alpha emissions and we wanted to prove that it would work. The 90 days, 3% thing, it's perfectly viable, but it's harder to work with teams long term. What happens when we've launched 12 teams or 20, right. Will we be able to work with each one long term? So we actually are setting up a venture studio so that we can put up front more of the investment in launching a team and then be able to incubate and accelerate teams for much longer periods of time. And in fact, we actually have some news that we want to break right here on this Week in Startups with you guys.
- [35:30]
Alex
All right. We love breaking news. Look at that.
- [35:33]
Chris Zakaria
Which I wanted it to be enough of a surprise. I didn't even tell you guys beforehand, like in the backstage, but thanks, by the way.
- [35:39]
Alex
Nothing's coming next.
- [35:41]
Chris Zakaria
There's nothing like doing things live. Huh? So we, our second team that we launched, Subnet 24 Quasar, they do long context models and intelligence. That means that they're looking to expand context windows for LLMs. We launched them in January. Three months later they're about to release their own model. And they were, they're close to being in the top 10 subnets. They have a fully diluted value of about $84 million. And what they were doing impressed Jacob so much that he decided to back them himself. And that happened to another team that we launched as well. And so when we were talking to Jacob about it, Jacob said, I want you guys to help bring more machine learning research teams onto the protocol and I want us to be able to build like a fully decentralized tech stack for Bittensor where we bring in the top machine learning startups and research teams to build on the protocol. So Jacob has given us funding to register subnet slots for machine learning research teams in a new machine learning track on bitstarter where we'll be working with teams across the protocol to deliver state of the art across a number of benchmarks, working with teams like Macrocosmos like Targon, who have already pushed the boundaries to bring in the best machine learning researchers, incubate them and help them to succeed on Bittensor.
- [37:05]
Alex
So to help them succeed on Bittensor though implies that. Well, one, congratulations. Should have started with that.
- [37:10]
Brian McCrindle
Thank you.
- [37:11]
Alex
But implies that there's enough room for them. And one thing that I keep kind of looping back to is this hard cap of 128 subnet slots. I know it was 64 back in the day, but to get all these ML engineers that you're hoping to have into the ecosystem to me implies you're going to need more total parking spots. So is that something that's being discussed? Is that coming or is much like the 21 million bitcoin cap is 128 the the end of it.
- [37:34]
Chris Zakaria
It definitely isn't the end of it. It will expand. And when Jacob was on Novelty Search to talk about conviction, he said that it will. They're definitely going to expand it to 2, 5, 6 soon. I think when we went up to 128 it the quality got a little bit uneven angle spreading out emissions over more subnets. There isn't really a hard limit. It's already a very, very large chain bit tensor for a layer one but it can handle more and it will go up again. Subnets get deregistered right now every couple of weeks and other subnets are for sale. So we've had a lot of new entrants in the past week. Alone, we've had about three new subnets come in. So the recycling is actually quite strong. It's like what you were saying earlier, Alex. It's really intense competition. So with the deregistration, we can get a new team in every month.
- [38:23]
Brian McCrindle
Yeah, it's okay. There's a. Sustainably. It's very hard to run a subnet. Like the, the. The process of trying to do everything from the marketing to the engineering to the socials to the, to the organizing of your own company. Right. Like, there's a lot of different components there. So like it just naturally, the churn is going to be high. Yeah. So, you know, like institutions like, or like macrocosmos or, Or, Yeah, like Targon or the shoots or the, the quasars. Quasars of the world. You know, they've gone through that process and been able to be successful. And again, that's what, you know, bitstarter is trying to do is to like, pull out, you out from the churn. Right. But there is, there's still a lot. But yeah, fundamentally, like, you should be able to go to like, you know, eventually it'll be to 256 and then it'll be 1028 and whatever that, whatever that comes to being. But there's definitely space within the ecosystem of Bittensor to have more machine learning. Like, I think for me, for what I've seen in the past couple years, there was like a few really good nuggets of ideas and research, LLMs. And then we went through this huge, massive product phase of like expanding the number of subnets and people trying to find product market fit and finding revenue and doing all these sorts of things. It almost feels in some way, shape or form, like the predominant energy feels like, okay, we need to do more machine learning, we need to do more of this stuff. And like, that doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be more products in the future of Bittensor, but there definitely is a lot of space, a growing space to do more like, fundamental research, to do more collaborative research, to do more fundamental things on Bittensor to push the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence forward.
- [39:49]
Alex
Well, this answers the question that Lana and I had in our notes, which is how many more ideas are feasible for this adversarial, decentralized model. And it sounds like even inside of the very niche area of ML in particular, because there are different projects out there, tons of space left to build to, to work and to host these competitions. So, Lon, I guess, you know, maybe we're gonna end up with you know, two, five, six subnets out there. More, more fun bashing one another, trying to make better stuff.
- [40:14]
Lon Harris
Future twist episodes. I'm happy to hear it.
- [40:17]
Brian McCrindle
Yeah, yeah. I think, I think also too just like putting another note in there. Right. Like I think the founders, Jake and Allah, and particularly Jake, like they're very amenable to what the next generation is going to look like. Right. So something happens in the ecosystem and they want to make the right move as fast as they can. Right. And sometimes that goes well, sometimes it goes poorly. But I think like that gradient of improvement is really fast, it's accelerating and if we find ourselves in a situation where like oh we have so much talent, we don't have the space like that, that day will come where we just, we increase it.
- [40:48]
Chris Zakaria
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to just touch on what people actually will get when they submit to the incubator, if they're chosen because we will register the subnet 4 for them. So that's the upfront cost, that's several hundred Tao paid for. We also have a partnership with Subnet 4 Targon which is run by Manifold Labs. They're offering free compute to our incubated teams for their post launch period. We're also in talks with Crucible Labs which is run by Allah, who's the other co founder of Bittensor with Jacob. Exactly. It's confidential Compute. Targon just published a paper with Intel. They are about to launch Targon os. They have the Targon virtual machine and by all accounts it's highly reliable which is what you need when you're doing say pre training of a model. Quasar already have a partnership with Targon and it's helped them to train their models. So we're creating a system whereby we've got a cross protocol selection of existing infrastructure that can help power the latest ML researchers to success long term for these other subnets. It's good for them commercially and it helps to create like a network effect of machine learning research on Bittensor.
- [42:02]
Alex
So there's several kind of individual loops that improve things. As you make better models, you can bring those to bear another subnet competitions, therefore those will yield better results, therefore bring in more people, competition for emissions goes up, Tao becomes more valuable, the ecosystem is worth more and then suddenly more people show up. Yeah, it's a, it's a great idea. Here's the thing that I want to flip around though. Jason's a huge bull. We talk about it all the time on the show. What's Bittensor's weakness like if you had to pick one, the thing that keeps you up at night, what's the other side of this, of this coin?
- [42:35]
Brian McCrindle
With every technology that there's always some weakness. I think one of the things is, like, it's very difficult to find the right project. Right. Like, I think it could be very difficult to find, parameterize your problem in the right way to get the actual most benefit out of it. It's. It's kind of an art and it takes a lot. Again, it takes a lot of time to figure out what that looks like. Sometimes you can find a problem where, if you know you're not expressive enough, like, you just won't be. You won't be better than the version that you created, because you've been the one thinking about this problem for many months, if not years, and then trying to launch it on Bittensor. If you don't do that in the right way, you won't end up in a good place. Right. So, again, like, places like bitstarter are trying to circumvent this, where, you know, you can talk to someone like myself or talk to someone else in the community and be like, oh, obviously that won't work. And you can, you can go further with this. Yeah. Do you have anything that you want to say, Chris?
- [43:26]
Chris Zakaria
I think its biggest weakness is the same as its biggest strength, and it's captured in this phrase, which is if your system only works when people play by the rules, your system doesn't really work. Bittensor. You have to design your product as if. As if it's for the people exploiting it, because you know that they're going to get. It's going to get exploited. You have to think in this really unusual inverse way where you're like, you have to design it with the exploit in mind so that it's almost like a jujitsu move, whereby when people go to exploit you, you use that power against them and it gets stronger. Right. And thinking like that is very unusual. We don't think like that in most
- [44:06]
Lon Harris
of life because your miners are your users. And normally you'd be like, we got to do everything we can to make this as smooth and cle and enjoyable for them as possible. But in this case, it's like, yeah, but they're also trying to screw me. And so I have to, like, navigate around that in advance.
- [44:21]
Chris Zakaria
Yeah, so. So you're creating. You're not launching a business or a startup, you're launching a network.
- [44:28]
Brian McCrindle
Right.
- [44:28]
Chris Zakaria
And actually, networks are the more appropriate home for AI than a business, which is Limited proprietary closed bot. That's not where AI is eventually going to live. And the clue is in nature. Right? Look at how intelligence develops in. In natural. In the natural world. It didn't develop in a single place. It developed through the survival of the fittest natural selection in a distributed system of predator and prey. That's exactly how we're building intelligence on Bittensor Minor validator. Right? You're creating, you're distributing the roles and you're creating the adversarial environment for that to grow. So it is the better home for it. It's just. If you thought running a startup was hard, try running a bit Tensor subnet.
- [45:11]
Lon Harris
Try running the process of evolution.
- [45:15]
Alex
Yeah, I was going to say Darwinian evolution via natural selection, AKA Bittensor. That's going to bring in all the founders. Man, it sounds super easy. But if people do want to find out more about the program you just announced, apart from going to bitstarter AI, your main site, where can they go to learn more?
- [45:30]
Chris Zakaria
So we will be opening submissions next week. We have a submissions portal for that. We are going to be incubating three teams a quarter, so applications will open app Bitstarter AI. You can also follow us on X. I'm Acrozac also at bitstarterai. So we'll be announcing the eligibility process there and we already have a couple of applications that we had beforehand that we put into the track and we'll be publishing the guidelines as well.
- [46:00]
Alex
All right, well, guys, we're super stoked about it. When you have your first three, come back on the show and tell us all about them because we're always here to learn more about awesome subnets. Thank you both so much for your time. And you can now turn off the. The Halloween light behind you.
- [46:11]
Chris Zakaria
Thank you very much.
- [46:12]
Alex
Next up, we're going to bring Ning Ren up from Trajectory rl. Ning, welcome to the show.
- [46:16]
Ning Ren
Yeah, hi. I'm very, very happy to join the podcast.
- [46:19]
Lon Harris
We're delighted to have you. We're.
- [46:22]
Alex
We're absolutely stoked. So we're going to go from the macro picture of the bit Tensor economy down to a single subnet. What we'd love to hear from you first is the pitch. What does subnet 11 trajectory RL do?
- [46:32]
Ning Ren
Yeah. Okay, let me introduce myself a little bit. I'm a founder and CEO at Trajectory rl. So Trajectory IR Soup is a new like company running on Bittensor. So if I put one sentence to describe the Trajectory IO So it is a new type of software company. It's Building software for not for humans, but for AI agents. So nowadays we call them skills. But future we may come up like a better name. But now we're running a company continuously producing such skills on software for AI agents. Now everybody is talking about cloud code Hermes and you talk about coworkers, everybody using it. So if you think about it, we are in the middle and very early days of a paradigm of platform shift. Like those AI agents become the new computer platform, become the new smartphone, become the new operating system. Just like any other existed operating system before they will need software to power them up to be useful. If you see around there are some skill hubs like around people still writing skills by hand. Like using web coding tools like yeah, like, but like we envision like future most of those skills will be written not by human but by AI agents. So this is a. Yeah.
- [48:02]
Alex
For some people out there who are a little bit behind. A skill is a skill ND file. It's essentially plain text. It's the written word, not code. And it's essentially a set of instructions to help an AI model or agent do one thing in particular. Is that fair ning?
- [48:19]
Ning Ren
Oh yeah. So like it's not necessarily be only a skilled md it can be a combination like a skill. Like some like MD files combines on a python file. Like coded examples like some like a logic to tell the agent how to do some like a business in a domain. It could be like your personal CRM. It could be a Twitter post, like a writing tool. It could be could be a website creating tool.
- [48:46]
Alex
Yeah, we've had a lot of these in our open cloud conversations for example. So we just had the folks on from Bitstarter talking about the economics of running a subnet. So tell us how Trajectory RL uses BitTensor to create and encourage the creation of better skills.
- [49:04]
Ning Ren
If you think about this, it's very like an interesting problem like how we can organize it. So basically we use B Tensor to architects trade like the agents all over the world to compete to collaborate to write a good skilled MD or like a skill pack. I think the first challenge we have is to create a good benchmark tools. Because now if you see around there is no good way to measure how a skill running on agent right. People just post like many people download use. This is a very innovation we create and so we basically we create a sandbox. Like technically we call it sandbox, but you can think of it as a puzzle box. Like the agent come. Any agent can come like code Hermes can come and open the puzzle box. And there are some tools included in the box and just give a puzzle to solve. We just compare, like compete. They're solving like the. Like the miner can write using any technique to write a good skill MD and the power agent and to solve this puzzle, which is ranking the score.
- [50:14]
Alex
But in this sandbox though, each agent would have the same model and harness. So that way the individual skill file would shine versus something else influencing the performance.
- [50:26]
Ning Ren
Basically same model, but like a different harness. So we compare across different like harness. Like the harness. Yeah, but we want basically know like the skills, how it performs. Like, with like different harness as well. Yeah.
- [50:43]
Alex
Okay, so Lon is a writer and I'm a writer, which means that skill files make a lot of sense to us because when it comes to typing out words and sentences, that's our bag. But I'm curious if that inherent method of creating skills, these markdown files, these text files, gives them a lower ceiling in terms of improvement than if they were done with code. Or alternatively, does it create a higher ceiling for improvement because they are written in English, for example, versus in code?
- [51:13]
Ning Ren
So I see there is a higher ceiling for the skills. So if you see there is a theory called the fat skills thing harness, that means that. So people think that the harness. Yeah, it's more like the operating system is only handle like the final reading and talking to the different IMs, like the input output. And there is a core component called resolver to just decide the right time to load the right MD file. And all these dust layer harness doing this well and the other the rest really magic happen. And all the intelligence will happen in the skill layer in the skill space. If you think it's open, you can think the people will have their own CRM. It's a skill. People will have different CRM a little bit. And eventually there would be infinite skills.
- [52:14]
Lon Harris
I guess my question would be I have a few skills that I've made and I'm not a coder, but just, hey, help me with YouTube titles or whatever. And the way I make them is, you know, I sort of work on them with Claude together until we're happy with how the skill is written up. And then it's trial and error. I'm trying it. Oh, I forgot to tell it to capitalize or it's using too many EM dashes or. And we sort of vibe code the skill together for a few hours until it's like perfectly tight. So is that essentially the same process that your agents are now replicating or is it more of like thinking about it in advance and taking out the sort of vibe coding time waste period.
- [52:52]
Ning Ren
Yeah it's kind of like the similar process but just like nowadays like you like using right the skills time deep by hands. But we want to replace by using agents like we designed the mechanism like Miner already using agents to writing skilled MD this way. But they use agent. They also use webconnect tool but they run their benchmark like they measure the result of the skill MD and they use the agent to iterate like you do but they deliver like they hand more and more work to the agent to automate this flow, this workflow. So this is.
- [53:38]
Alex
I think I get this. The question then becomes what skills are the most interesting to set up competitions for to improve. Because Lon just mentioned he's got this YouTube title skill a bit niche. Interesting useful YouTube videos.
- [53:55]
Lon Harris
They all need titles.
- [53:57]
Alex
Maybe it's a good point is that is that the the the type of skill that is a good fit for trajectory RL or is it more general skills that are going to be the early product market fit use case.
- [54:10]
Ning Ren
Good question. Good question. So there could be like a very different type of skills. And so we are still. We are also exploring like which one could like it's better to mirror and so that's why we set up seasons like the first few seasons we want to employ some like meta skill like it's easy to measure and is more widely can be widely used like the self learning skills that this is the first season. So we just launched our first season for like less than a week. And yeah I can so I can please screen share I can show you so you can see. So there are like the different type of skill we can we can measure. So like the first season we do like do some like a meta skills called the self learning and we want to enable the agents can just when they encounter some errors they can learn and they can fix them themselves. This is the first season we just launch it for like less than a week. So you can see we create our benchmark.
- [55:19]
Alex
Yeah tell people what this chart shows because a lot of folks are on the audio version so tell them what they're seeing here.
- [55:26]
Ning Ren
So basically we bring like some popular self learning skills because they are already on the skill hub like many other places like to run our benchmark and we also pick the the winner in our like subnet to do a like side by side apples to IPost comparison. Like how like like how how they work. So because we can measure like we create a benchmark so we know so we can improve. Like if you can, you cannot mirror. We cannot improve. So we can. So if you see the leaderboard like we only run for a week, we already see some very promising results. Like our subnets winner already performed a little bit better than the Sota on the market. So just by keep running this season we will get our very good Sota self learning skills. So to answer your question to back to your question, yes, so we will compete on more and more different type of skills, but we will start from the meta, more like a general meta skills first.
- [56:42]
Alex
So we have companies in the worldline building AI models both open and closed source. We have bittensor having several subnets that are working on training models in a decentralized basis, on an open basis. And now with trajectory we have a way to apply the same competitive logic to skills. Essentially turning each skill file or skill that you can use into an improving process similar to what we see elsewhere. Okay, so the result of this ning is that everyone's agent is going to be more capable and more performant and out of the box because the skills you can bring to them are already better. Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me and I would love that. I've made some skills too. They're garbage. So I would love to get some help from the experts.
- [57:26]
Lon Harris
Yeah, I mean I think that leads to my next question which is, I mean conventionally the way I think of skills, they're basically free. Like somebody designs a skill and then they tweet it out and then they're like, hey, I wrote this X article about how I trained my new open cloth skill and da da da da da, try it out yourself, here it is. And so I mean I think you're sort of looking forward to a future where skills become a lot more dense and a lot more valuable. And then there also is, is money sort of. They're, they're, they're actually worth something. And people would pay you for a skill? Is that, is that the vision? And how much do you think people are going to be willing to drop on a really amazing right out of the box skill?
- [58:05]
Ning Ren
So I think in future there definitely will be the business value inside and skills. So if you remind the early, like 90s early PC days, there will be a bunch of free softwares, but later like the smartphone app store like, but later there will be super software, there will be Instagram, like so if you like, our current mission is to maximize the distribution and installation of the skills. And later like there are hundreds of ways that you can Figure out to the like monetization.
- [58:37]
Alex
Do you need to monetize learning? Because the way that I was thinking about the competition, the bittensor subnet kind of self funds via emissions. So could you create a system here that doesn't actually need to have a business on the back end and instead it's essentially just a recurring competition to create better and better skills and then everyone can use them because you know, tau emissions filtering down to the subnet compensate everyone for the work they're doing already.
- [59:07]
Ning Ren
Yeah, good question. So this is actually exactly what we are doing now. So we are leveraging the bittensor incentives to drive the agents to submit to optimize the skilled md. But my thought would be like in the end of the day we still need to find the pmf. Like we still to make money, like make real product. And so we just take advantage of how we to take benefit from the bittensor to co start us like incubate us to a state like we have a super massive adoption and we can find a way to charge to user to user pay. There's also another very good angle like the trajectory data. So when we run so many skills and collect so many data, those data are also valuable as well. So we can sell this to the model. We can even try and fine tune our models to like.
- [60:09]
Lon Harris
Yeah, I got one more question then we'll let you go. Nick, what is the most valuable or useful skill that's been designed so far on trajectory? Can you walk us through like I want to get a clearer example of like how how intense and awesome these skills are going to be.
- [60:26]
Ning Ren
Oh okay. Yeah. So since we just we are relatively new, we are like about more than one month on B Tensor which launched our first season about less than one week and the first season about self learning. So we all are already see good self learning skills. Like just about one week is very impressive. So people already find some good way to write have learning skill timely. So now you can go to our website and try those skills self learning skills to just make your agent. So if you use them day to day make them like make less mistake and save your tokens solve like a problem more effectively.
- [61:08]
Alex
All right, well we really really appreciate it. Ning, what's the website and tell us when season two begins.
- [61:14]
Ning Ren
Oh Xintu. So the website is trashrl.com like trajectoryrl.com yeah. So the season two will be hold like in about one month. So we plan to hold the season one for one month and to start after that. But in the future as I Said we want to drive this process all by agents, and we want to continuously roll up new citizens just by agents. We. We want to build AI native company ourselves.
- [61:50]
Alex
Well, I. I freaking love it because I need better skills. I think everyone does. And I think that this is such a lightweight, easy to share format that if you make a better one, the whole world gets to benefit from it. So, to me, there's a lot of really, like, human positive gains to be had here, and that's just super encouraging, you know?
- [62:08]
Ning Ren
And thank you. Thank you, Janice. Yeah.
- [62:10]
Alex
All right, well, Nick, thanks for coming on the show after season two. Come back and tell us what people have built and tell us how much you're improving the world, because I want to stop working very soon, so I'm hoping that AI gets me there. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
- [62:21]
Ning Ren
Thank you.
- [62:22]
Lon Harris
I like thinking about companies in terms of seasons. You get to talk about it. It's like. It's like TV. Like, man, I can't wait for season two of Trajectory. R.L. they're going to really up the stage.
- [62:29]
Alex
I mean, that's the thing that really blows me away here, Lon, is the simple fact that we're now seeing essentially a decentralized network designed for ML competitions. Yeah. Coming together to have the nerds battle it out to write the best sentences in English.
- [62:44]
Lon Harris
Yeah. And it's. It's funny that skills are just. Just marked out. I did not even realize that when I was first teaching them openclaw. I thought it was writing code. And then it was like, hey, Claw, here's what I want you to do first do. They're like, oh, I could have done this myself.
- [62:55]
Alex
I remember when Anthropic first announced these. I was reading through the announcement. This is back in, like, what, mid 25, late 24, somewhere in there. And they were like a skill. MG file is a text file with words in it. And I'm like, what am I missing here? This sounds useless. Why would you ever want that? That doesn't do anything. And then it turns out that one, they were right and I was wrong. But also the power of the written word.
- [63:15]
Lon Harris
I think that that a lot of the power of Open Claw initially to doofuses like me. Like, I'm sure the coders got it immediately. Like, why it was valuable, but it was just that it was finally delivering on the. You can literally just tell the AI what you want, and it'll just do it. Like, we've been promised that for so long. And then you would use opicon. You would just be in Your slack and you'd be like, do this and it go okay. It wouldn't always work, but it would say, okay.
- [63:39]
Alex
Yeah.
- [63:39]
Lon Harris
And it would, like, act like it understood you.
- [63:41]
Alex
You know what might be a good model? We should have kept ning on for this. But whatever, I'll just say now before we move on. Have you heard of the. The humble bundle model?
- [63:49]
Lon Harris
The gaming, like Valve games? If you buy them, you get a bunch. A bunch of indie games for one low, low price. And then you could try them all out.
- [63:57]
Alex
Yeah, you can get like, you know, 15 games for like 10 bucks. And so to me, like, I love to contribute to projects that I. That I enjoy. Things that I really love to use. If you're a metal band that I follow. I own several heavy metal Christmas tree ornaments. Not because I really need them, but because I wanted to support the bands, you know, so if they did a humble bundle of skills, I would so happily contribute to paying 15, 20, or even like 100 bucks.
- [64:23]
Lon Harris
Frankly, I do. I will say I notice how much my skills get better over time as I iterate. Like, every time I notice something I don't like, I go back and fix the skill to, like, make sure that doesn't happen again and vice versa. And so if that, if. If doofus me, who's barely paying attention, can bring that kind of iteration over time, I can only imagine that people who were really focused on and incentivized to make these skills much better, they could be 100x better. I'm only making you or 3x better because I got other, you know, ju.
- [64:53]
Alex
You got to say stop. You got to stop with the putting yourself down. You go, oh, I'm a doofus. Oh, I'm not a coder. You have been deep in the openclaw trenches to the point in which I know the name of your agent, which is a weird thing to know. It feels a little bit too personal.
- [65:05]
Lon Harris
It's like the everyday focus character for Blade Runner.
- [65:08]
Alex
But you. You use openclaw a lot. You use AI all the time. You've made your own skills.
- [65:12]
Lon Harris
I did. I did use openclaw, but my Open claw is locked in an AWS rack somewhere, and he has a lot of trouble getting out. Like, people are very dubious about a bot that's inside aws. They're like, get out of here, you. So I actually have switched. I'm mostly using Claude Cowork now because it's much easier to just. You're just like, here, take. You're in my notion now. And Claude goes Okay. And yeah, Gaff is like, I can't get him. What are you trying to show me? Can you copy?
- [65:41]
Alex
But the same skill in D file. The same skill in D file works on both, which is incredible. That's the power of him. All right, before we go, a couple of other things to note folks. From the news tickers out there. Angellist just dropped right before you got on air, a new product called usvc, which is a private market fund designed to give individuals we who have 500, which is the minimum exposure lawn to a number of major names in the world of venture capital startups.
- [66:10]
Lon Harris
Yeah, I love these.
- [66:10]
Alex
I think this is super.
- [66:11]
Lon Harris
Individuals who have 500 in like, this is an exclusive group.
- [66:15]
Alex
No, I mean that's the whole point. It's not. I mean everyone has. Well, I'm not going to say that and get made fun of on the Internet, but most people can find 500 somewhere and then they can take part in venture economics. I got to read a little bit of the prospectus and what I learned is this actually operates a bit like a venture fund. You put money in, you can't take it out.
- [66:36]
Lon Harris
Right.
- [66:37]
Alex
There will be some repurchases on a quarterly basis, but mostly you're waiting for exits.
- [66:41]
Lon Harris
Yeah, I see they have here on the website the power law. One investment has the potential to generate a higher return than the rest of their portfolio combined. This is why USBC intends to build a bundle. Not a single bet. So the idea is even your 500, it's getting spread out so you're not all in on one thing and then you lose your, you lose your shirt.
- [67:00]
Alex
Yes, I think it's a great idea. We'll have more about it. This is actually one of two products. Robinhood has a publicly traded venturing fund thing. So this does seem to be a growing product category as companies stay private.
- [67:13]
Lon Harris
I did notice with the Robinhood one, they're, they're kind of locked out of a lot of the most sought after private companies. I wonder if that's going to happen with this as well. Like, like OpenAI. They're not exposed to OpenAI and the Robin Hood venture fund. And a lot of people were like, why not?
- [67:29]
Alex
That's what I want. Do you know, do you know where a lot of venture capital funds run their technology? Angelist. Oh, well, you know what that means. Angelist has a lot of X. There you go. So I'm hoping that this is actually, actually magic.
- [67:40]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [67:40]
Alex
Frankly line, my expectation is, is high.
- [67:43]
Lon Harris
Expectation is magic.
- [67:46]
Alex
I'm sorry. High expectations are A gift. They're welcome. Next up, the compute. The compute wars continue to absolutely go crazy. Two things of note here for everyone out there paying attention. Lon. First of all, Anthropic and Amazon pinned a new deal this week. $5 billion of investment, 4.5Gw of compute, $100 billion wor of spend over the next 10 years. Anthropic to AWS. And maybe, maybe this will solve the, the Claude crisis in which everyone gets locked out after 10 minutes. Theoretically.
- [68:13]
Lon Harris
I mean I think eventually Anthropic's got to be worried about how people will eventually solve it, which is find another model to like. I feel like they're, they have, they have a limited window here to solve this problem before people are like, ah, okay, I'll try Codex. You know, like it's, it's. The gap is, the gap is closing
- [68:31]
Alex
and we're talking about AI time frames. So whatever you were thinking, divide it by 10.
- [68:35]
Lon Harris
Yeah, exactly.
- [68:36]
Alex
You know, it's brutal. The other thing, and this came out today is that Google has two new chips. They make tensor processing units. Don't forget a scalar is a zero dimensional vector. A sorry, zero dimensional tensor. A vector is a one dimensional tensor. Tensors have multiple dimensions. Anyways, it matters if you care about data. Shape versus flatness. But they're tpuscular are now on generation 8 and they have two different versions, one built for training. Yes, get this, TPU8T and then there's TPU8I which is for inference. I think this is brilliant and I think goes to show that Nvidia is not going to make all the money in the world.
- [69:10]
Lon Harris
Yeah, there's going to be, I mean we're seeing, there's so many of these companies now that are working on their own, isn't there? There's Trainium, Amazon has Trainium which they should really work on the name for. It's just, it's like.
- [69:21]
Alex
Yeah, it's not inferencing.
- [69:23]
Lon Harris
Yeah, it's like it sounds like a mineral, an obtainium from Avatar. Like go one level deeper on that.
- [69:28]
Alex
Guys, we'll go, we'll go get the pickaxe out and figure out what's going on. There's also a lot of companies in the startup world. Etched is working on a LLM, sorry, a Transformers specific Asic for example has
- [69:41]
Lon Harris
those like massive room size chips.
- [69:43]
Alex
They're working on wafer and they refiled to go public last Friday.
- [69:48]
Chris Zakaria
Oh wow.
- [69:48]
Alex
It's a very interesting return to the markets. And then I guess lon just One last thing before we go. Should we just talk for a moment about Apple getting a new season?
- [69:57]
Lon Harris
Yeah. Tim Apple is out. John Apple is. Is it? I. I'm insistent.
- [70:02]
Alex
Can we call him Johnny Apples to
- [70:03]
Lon Harris
call the new guy? His name is John Ternus, but I think we should just switch over to calling him John Apple. Now. I think that whoever's the CEO of Apple, you get that becomes your last name. I think that's only fair.
- [70:13]
Alex
Explain, explain why, why Donald Trump messed
- [70:17]
Lon Harris
up one time and called Tim Cook Tim Apple. And it's. I'm not, I literally am not even here to make fun of our president. I just think it's a very funny thing to call the CEO of Apple Tim Apple or John Apple. So anyway, yes, Apple CEO Tim Cook, he's stepping down as executive, he's up again as CEO and he's going to transition to being executive chairman of Apple's board of directors. John Ternus. Now John Apple, the current senior Vice president of hardware engineering, he's stepping into the CEO role. I know that a lot of people were very excited that it's a, it's a hardware guy. And a lot of people are thinking this is going to represent, you know, rather than somebody who's sort of trying to like squeeze as much money as they can out of the Jobs legacy by releasing, you know, these, these new versions of the classic product lineup that here's a guy that's going to like rethink the whole company based on, you know, silicon and new devices and where they are right now.
- [71:09]
Alex
Also someone with incredibly deep DNA in the world of Apple. I went to his LinkedIn and I pulled this image. Went to school at UPenn 93 to 97, had four years as an engineer at Virtual Research and then since July of 2001 he's been in Apple, which is nearly 25 years. And that's an impressive run at one company. And just goes to show that in the old days you could work for one company for a while, you didn't get laid off all the time.
- [71:33]
Lon Harris
I read that he was one of the lead sort of minds behind your new MacBook, your MacBook Neo. He was one of the champions of that, which has been a well regarded, sort of a rare new Apple product that people like and feel good about. So there you go.
- [71:49]
Alex
It's, it's magic. It's magic because it's the first Apple product I've ever owned that if I drop a Dr. Pepper onto it and completely ruin it, I don't have to cry.
- [71:58]
Lon Harris
I Feel like I.
- [71:59]
Alex
That's very free.
- [71:59]
Lon Harris
I feel like I could drop a Dr. Pepper on my iPhone and it would stick up to that. I don't. I don't.
- [72:04]
Alex
Oh, I meant something with a keyboard.
- [72:06]
Lon Harris
Oh, okay. Yes, yes. Fair enough.
- [72:07]
Chris Zakaria
Yes.
- [72:08]
Alex
Wait, like if I, If I torch my. Like my M3 Max Pro Viper, I'll be.
- [72:12]
Lon Harris
I need. I. I know we're wrapping up. I need to stop you right there. So what about the MacBook Neo? If you dropped it, if you poured a Dr. Pepper on it, how would it be? Fine. I don't understand.
- [72:22]
Alex
Oh, I don't. I don't care. It's cheap.
- [72:24]
Lon Harris
Oh, it's so cheap. I understand. Okay, I thought you were saying something about it like a new kind of aluminum that repels Dr. Pepper.
- [72:32]
Alex
No, no, no, no. My pink MacBook Neo does not have special anti soda properties to it.
- [72:38]
Lon Harris
You're just. You could afford to buy another one because they're not the most expensive thing in the world.
- [72:43]
Alex
I paid like 600 bucks for it. Which for a laptop.
- [72:46]
Lon Harris
Yeah, no, that's really.
- [72:47]
Alex
Usually means you're getting some piece of. From hp, right? That's plastic and terrible and has gunk all over it.
- [72:53]
Lon Harris
The infamous company that. There's that video of Turnus on stage introducing the thousand dollar computer stand. So your, Your, Your. Your. Your new MacBook costs less than that stand?
- [73:05]
Alex
Yes. Well, there is two markets for Apple products. There's sane people and insane people. And you know what? They sell the. Sell to all types. One quick note here from our producer Salat, who says that Dr. Pepper tastes like medicine. Salat, you're fire. I love Dr. And with that twist will be back on Friday. We'll see you guys then. Lawn an absolute treat. We appreciate everyone tuning into the live show, the Noti Gangster. We're back on Friday noon, Texas time, 1pM Eastern. Y' all are lovely. See you then.
- [73:29]
Lon Harris
Bye bye.