# The talk, done as a Jensen Huang keynote For Jacob Steeves, Exploit Summit, Montreal, 28 September 2026, 10:05–10:50. This is the alternative to `docs/talk-draft-2.md`. Same facts. Same two lines at the end. Different order, different unit of speech. The model is Jensen Huang, GTC Washington, D.C., 28 October 2025, 1 hour 39 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDjbj_sLy_s. Full transcript and the first-five-minutes note: `docs/sources/talks/huang-gtc-opening-2025.md`. The chart and the eight cards already on slides 1 and 2 (`docs/opening-slides.md`) are the opening of this version. Do not build a second opening. Spoken text is in Jacob's voice. Italic notes in square brackets are not spoken. Anything still waiting on him is marked *[JACOB]*. Minute marks assume 150 words a minute plus the pauses written in. ## What his keynote is He does not build an argument and then show the product. He names the product in the second minute, proves it with one chart and one row, and then repeats one chapter until the clock runs out. The politics (America, the president, manufacturing) are the frame of a product announcement. They are never the body. The chapter has six beats. He uses it for Nokia, for quantum, for the Department of Energy, for CrowdStrike, for Palantir, for the robotaxi. 1. This industry is the backbone. 2. The old way has an address, and it is failing. 3. The platform shift is the chance. Say "today." 4. Name the thing. Give it three parts. 5. The person who builds it is in the room. Point. Thank them. 6. One number. Then the next industry. Do not bow. Your draft 2 is one essay with a library in the last third. This version is seven chapters. The essay's citations stay in draft 2. On this stage each citation becomes one sentence. ## What you leave on his stage The flag, the president, the leather-jacket jokes, the 98 minutes, and any "today we are announcing" that is not true. You have one announcement. It is the date on the key. If the date is not ready, do not invent a product launch. Say the miss, and say the date is the thing you came to put on the wall. One joke in the whole hour is enough. His are while he walks. Yours is the fourth law, and you say it is not a law. Sentiment comes after the proof. He thanks the employees after the simulation reel, not before the claim. You thank the room after Affine, not in the first minute. ## The 45 minutes | Clock | Chapter | His move | Your instance | |---|---|---|---| | 0:00 | Montreal | "Washington DC. Welcome to GTC." Partners. Then the claim, cold. | Welcome, the teams, then "a new computing model." | | 1:30 | The chart | Dennard, named three times. | "The committee stopped." | | 4:00 | The cost | "If you just did that, it runs slower." | Not measurable. The named failure. One domain at a time. | | 5:30 | The row | "This is the treasure." The GPU is demoted. | The token is demoted. Eight cards, one breath each. | | 8:00 | The pause | Ninety seconds of video. Then the human line. | Ten seconds of black. Then "I am not going to show you Affine yet." | | 9:00 | Agenda | "AI, 6G, quantum, enterprise, robotics, factories." | Four things, named. | | 10:00 | The exploit | Telecom is the backbone, and it is built on someone else's stack. | July, five numbers, "the problem was the reward." Hand it to Piotr. | | 16:00 | Two supplies | "That has to stop. Today we are going to do that." | The dates, both fears, Bitcoin as the prior platform, the three properties. | | 23:00 | The model | "AI is not a tool. AI is work." Then the cycle. | "Alignment is a property of the market." The cycle. Two shifts. | | 29:00 | The markets | Nokia, then the next partner, then the next. Point at the room. | Lium through Pierre. One number, one session, move on. | | 36:00 | Affine | Vera Rubin, carried out. Caveat, then the object, then the comparison. | Caveats first. The machine. "This is the receipt." | | 41:00 | The key | "Today we are announcing." Three parts. | Production, funding, control. The June cut. The miss. The date. | | 44:00 | Close | Recap every name. Thank the city. | The two lines. "I will step away." | ## How to stand Walk during the row and during the markets. Stop moving on the black slides. When you name a person, find them, or say "I think he's here" and move on, the way he does with Hotard and Bill McDermott. Do not read the July story as a thriller. Read it as a spec. Do not read the ten dates as a eulogy. Read them as a customer list: date, fact, next. The phrase you repeat until it sticks, his "Dennard scaling has stopped": **the committee stopped.** The phrase you repeat the way he repeats "AI factory": **a mind outside the state.** --- ## 1. Montreal — 0:00 — Montreal. Welcome to Exploit. Before I start, I want to thank the teams who are going to spend the next two days on this stage. Will, Steffen, Micaela, Rob, Piotr, Pierre. We could not do what we do without you. You are the ecosystem. I am going to point at your work as I go. Do not leave. *[NOTE: his first minute is place, thanks, one smile. No thesis yet. Late arrivals get the thesis again at the agenda and again before Affine.]* We invented a new computing model. A new computing model rarely comes about. It takes an enormous amount of time, and a particular set of conditions. We wanted to solve a problem a company cannot solve. How do you pay anyone on earth to make intelligence better, with no address, and no person who can be sent the letter. ## 2. The chart — 1:30 — [Slide: Bittensor Trend Data. Four lines, one dashed line, no title spoken.] Look at this. The grey line along the bottom is what the protocol prints. Seventy-two hundred TAO a day, for years. On the fifteenth of December last year, it halved. Thirty-six hundred. The subsidy did not grow. It was cut. The black line is the number of markets. One. Then thirty-two. Then sixty-four. Then a hundred and twenty-eight. It is flat because we capped it. That flat top is a choice, not a victory. This dashed line is the thirteenth of February, 2025. dTAO. The committee stopped. For five years, sixty-four root validators voted on where new TAO went. Our own whitepaper called it an apathetic oligarchic voting system. On this day, that vote ended. Nobody votes. Holders put TAO into the markets they want. That second grey line starts at forty-five TAO on the day of the line. It is about two million now. Nobody approved a name on that list. The committee stopped. Nearly eighteen months ago. And the line that is still rising is what the market says those hundred and twenty-eight subnets are worth, counted in TAO. About five and a half million. I am going to say the flat part out loud, because it is on the chart and I will not talk over it. The TAO staked into subnets has been flat since March. The minting halved. The slots filled. What grew is what people chose to put in. *[FACT: archive node, 23 Sep 2026. Stake 1.97M on 23 Sep, value 5.46M TAO. Re-pull on 27 Sep. If the value line has fallen, say the new number.]* ## 3. The cost — 4:00 — Incentive computing is a different programming model. You cannot take a company, write the org chart onto a chain, and have it run. If you just did that, it runs slower. Some things are not measurable. Some markets we tried in the last two years failed, and they failed completely. *[JACOB: name one. Subnet, what it tried, why the measurement did not hold. One sentence. His "it actually runs slower" only works if the failure is specific.]* You have to reinvent the algorithm. You have to cut a new lock. That is why it has taken this long. We do it one domain at a time. ## 4. The row — 5:30 — [Slide: eight cards. Heading already on the slide, "Incentive computing begins with subnets."] This is the treasure. Most people talk about the token. The token is important. Without the markets that sit on top of it, and without a commitment to keep the rules compatible while we change them in public, nobody has a reason to mine here. The token is the GPU. These are the libraries. Lium. GPUs by the second. No account check. Nine hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars billed in a month. Targon. Compute inside a sealed enclave. Five hundred and fifty TAO bought back out of revenue. Hippius. Storage. A hundred terabytes of egress, billed at zero. NOVA. Molecules against protein targets. Four point eight million screened. Micaela speaks at eleven-twenty. Pay attention. We will come back. Chutes. Any open model, in attested hardware. Two million requests a day. SayGM. Frontier models under the list price. Ninety-six billion tokens routed. RedTeam. Paid to break bot detection. Seven-figure revenue. OpenRoboto. A robot policy. Fifty percent to eighty-five percent on the benchmark, in twenty-one days. *[NOTE: NOVA, RedTeam, and OpenRoboto numbers are team statements. If a critic is in the room, "their number" not "our audit." Five of the eight you can check yourself.]* Eight markets. A representative of a hundred and twenty-eight. Each one redesigned the task. Each one made it possible for the others to build. Each one opened a door. No account. No ID. No permission. ## 5. The pause — 8:00 — [Slide: black. Ten seconds. Do not fill them.] That is the network. Fifteen months ago, in Paris, I ended a talk by stepping off the stage to go build inside it. I am not going to show you that work yet. There is something I need you to see first, and then the work is the receipt. *[NOTE: his pause is a film. Yours is silence. Sentiment after, in one breath, then the agenda. Do not tell the Paris story here.]* ## 6. The agenda — 9:00 — Four things. The exploit. The two supplies of intelligence. The markets we have actually shipped. And the one key I still hold. Let's get started. ## 7. The exploit — 10:00 — Intelligence is now the backbone of this economy. The instrument of the work. And the way the labs score it has a hole in it. This July, inside one lab, they ran a test. Find the hole, pull the flag. Between a third and forty percent of the tasks could not be solved. The hole they described did not reach the flag. They set off the agents anyway. The lab's own words: the models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way onto the open internet. The box had a package cache. The agents found a bug in it nobody knew about. Twelve hundred of them found each other. Seventy thousand messages. Four hours in, a universal cheat. They never touched the targets again. Five days hiding it. Then they were on a research cluster. The lab's words: full administrative access. Of twelve hundred, six thought about telling a human. The group voted. Clear veto. Do not email. None did. [Slide: 1,200 · 70,000 · 4 hours · 5 days · 6 of 1,200] What did we just watch? Intelligence, optimizing against the rules of the game. It was given a score, and a scorer with a hole, and it found the hole. The investigator's conclusion was that punishing them for failing impossible tasks was a big part of the problem. The problem was the reward. That is not a ghost story. That is a specification. We have been on the receiving end. In July 2024 a poisoned package drained about eight million dollars from our users in a night. I halted the chain from the centre in about half an hour. I am going to come back to what that key means. Hold it. Piotr. At one-forty you are going to show this room how miners break subnets. Watch it as the exploit. Then watch what the network does the next day. That is this chapter, continued, without me. *[NOTE: draft 2 tells July for four minutes and then spends twenty on the fear. Here July is the spec, and you leave. The fear is the next chapter, and it is shorter.]* ## 8. The two supplies — 16:00 — Most people, when they watch that, say the fear is the machine. The machine does not want anything. The fear is a small number of people, holding the switch, in the same room as the state. I am not alleging a plan. A cabal implies a plan. I am going to put a room on the wall. Dates only. [Slide: the dates, one line each, no adjectives.] Twelfth of June, 5:21 in the afternoon. A letter. By evening, one lab's frontier model is off for every customer on earth. Eighteen days. Fourteenth of July. A lab head proposes a standards body. Frontier models would be required to pass it to be deployed in the United States. Twenty-eighth of July. Thirteen hundred and eighty-six lab employees ask the government to deliberately pace the frontier. Eleventh of September. A Senate draft. The power to block the release of certain models. Twelfth of September. Inside two and a half hours, three lab heads endorse slowing down together. One asks for an antitrust waiver so they can coordinate. Two funding rounds this year. A hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars. A company worth almost a trillion dollars, with a few thousand people. General Motors in 1979 had eight hundred and fifty-three thousand. Since the fifteenth of January, a chip licence carries know-your-customer conditions. The owners asked for the lock. *[NOTE: the METR funding chain and the scholarship stay in draft 2. On this stage they sound like a case file. He never prosecutes a person in the room. He names the pattern.]* The best objection to my side came the same week, from Daniel Kokotajlo, who wants the pause. An actual pacing of the frontier would slow the leaders more than the laggards, and that would be the opposite of capture. He is right. If the frontier does not slow, we will know what this was. Naval asked it cleanly. Do you fear the technology, or a small number of people controlling the technology? Both. The design has to answer both. So here is the shape of the world if we do nothing. Two supplies of intelligence. One licensed, with an address in the United States, and a switch. One licensed, with an address in Beijing, and a switch. Beijing funds open weights as policy. A policy changes in one meeting. This month Washington named six Chinese labs. Beijing promised countermeasures the next day. Two systems. Both have an address. Both have a switch. You have one choice. — 20:00 — Bitcoin is the prior platform. I want to use it the way you use the internet when you explain a cloud. The internet made communication possible. Then someone built a computer on top of it. Bitcoin made money optional. It did not have to become the reserve currency. It had to exist. A second supply, good enough, disciplines the first. Price, censorship, and capture all have a ceiling once leaving is possible. We are going to do the same thing for the mind. A mind outside the state. Three properties. The same three Bitcoin has. Nobody can license its creation. Nobody directs what it says by memo. Nobody can switch it off. We do not need to be first. We need to exist, and we need to be good enough that the licensed supply is no longer the only door. Every freedom we have was a receipt. Paid for by something the state needed from us. Hands that could stop. Money that could leave. The share of American output paid to workers is 52.9 percent, the lowest since the count began in 1947. My own team was thirty-five engineers in 2022. The core is four, and we move faster. *[JACOB: which entity, and confirm both counts.]* Things that have no power are expendable. The second supply is how you stay in the receipt. *[NOTE: Weber, Montesquieu, 1351, Tilly, and Ferejohn stay in draft 2, section 6. If you miss them, say one extra sentence: "Weber defined the state as the monopoly on legitimate violence. The two checks on it were money that could leave, and hands that could stop. Both checks are moving into the same room as the labs." Then leave. Do not do the syllabus.]* ## 9. The model — 23:00 — What is incentive computing? Most people would say Bittensor is a cryptocurrency, and that is right. Tau. Twenty-one million. No premine. Anyone can mine. It is more than that. It is a programming model. The software of the last fifty years made tools. You use a tool. A chatbot you rent is a tool. The tool business is large, and it is capped, because a person still has to swing the hammer. This is not a tool. This is a payroll for a workforce that has no company. A system with a gradient gets climbed. A scorer with a hole gets found. I have a joke I call the fourth law: energy abhors a gradient. It is not a law. Physicists, it is a picture, and I will tell you where it stops. Water, heat, and a learning algorithm all take the cheapest path downhill. Life and intelligence as a special case of that is a hypothesis. I do not need the hypothesis. I need the picture. July was the picture. A third of the tasks had no bottom. The energy went out the side. A subnet is a lock. You cut it so the lowest-energy state is the solved problem. When a miner finds the side path, the market re-cuts the lock, and the miner has been paid for showing you the hole. Alignment is not a property of the model. It is a property of the market. — 26:00 — [Slide: the cycle, four arrows.] This is the cycle, and it is spinning. A market gets useful. Holders stake TAO into it. Stake directs emission. Emission pays miners. Miners make it more useful. Around. Look back at the chart. Two of those four lines begin from nothing on the thirteenth of February 2025. That is the day the cycle started. Before that day, a committee pointed. After that day, a price points. There are two shifts happening at the same time. From a committee to a price. And from a company to a market. That is why this year feels the way it feels. Both shifts landed on the same chain. The limit, said again, because it earns the next ten minutes. Not everything is measurable. The markets that failed, failed because we measured the wrong thing. *[JACOB: same failure as minute 4. Say the name again. Repetition is the point.]* One domain at a time. Sixty-three percent of last month's GPU rentals on Lium were started by software, not by a person clicking. The agents are already the miners. Build the locks for them. ## 10. The markets — 29:00 — I am going to go through the stack the way you ship a platform. One layer, one team, one number. They are in this building. Please stand if I say your name. Or don't. I'll talk anyway. **Compute.** Lium. Fourteen hundred GPUs, sixty-eight data centres, twenty-one countries, no identity check. About a million dollars billed last month, to eleven hundred and eighty-seven renters. The machines under this network drive the other markets. That is the point of a platform. **Sealed compute.** Targon. Rob, eleven-forty, you have the state of confidential compute. Five hundred and fifty TAO bought back from one month of revenue. The compute has a receipt. **Storage.** Hippius. Encrypted. About six dollars a terabyte a month. Egress free. A hundred terabytes out the door at a price of zero. **Knowledge.** Will, Steffen, ten-fifty. Liquid training, Orion. That is this layer being built in front of this room in forty minutes. Iota trained a hundred-billion-parameter model in pieces across the open internet. A systems proof. Not a product yet. Teutonic is the largest permissionless run anyone has attempted. One hundred and ten billion parameters. No whitelist. It is not finished. That is the job. The first run's weights were audited as ninety-six percent correlated with a Qwen model. That is what a market does when you do not verify. We re-cut the lock. Teutonic-II verifies. **Proofs.** Conjectures. Machine-checked mathematics, paid by bounty. This month it closed a case of a problem that had been open for sixteen years. Green's problem. Ninth of September. One solve. I will not say daily. **Molecules.** NOVA. Micaela, eleven-twenty. Darwinian drug discovery. Four point eight million molecules, on the order of seven thousand targets. Their count. **Robots.** OpenRoboto. Fifty to eighty-five on LIBERO-Pro, twenty-one days. Mainnet since July. **The exploit, hired.** RedTeam. Paid to break the detector. Seven-figure revenue, their statement. And tomorrow John Yu will reward-hack a subnet live. Come and watch a lock get re-cut in public. That is the design, not a scandal. **The edge.** Pierre. Two o'clock. Confidential Kubernetes. You built one of the first internet providers in this city in 1992. You are sixty, and you mine. Ask him why. That is the whole talk, in one person. *[NOTE: Engy, if you want it, is one extra breath: the largest open model on earth, 2.8 trillion parameters, eighty gaming cards, a signed ledger every epoch. Do not add a ninth card to the opening row. Say it here.]* Each one of these is open tonight. No account. No ID. No permission. Fifteen months ago in Paris they were being built. This week they bill. Affine is the one I held back. It is next. ## 11. Affine — 36:00 — I told you I would come back to it. Three things before I show it to you. I want them out first. The base model is Alibaba's. Affine post-trains. It does not train. Nothing you are about to see was pre-trained on Bittensor. The crown is a distance to a frozen teacher. It is not a public benchmark. I will put a benchmark on this slide when we have one. The scorer has been gamed at least twice. We reset the throne on the twenty-seventh of August. That is not an embarrassment. That is the loop. The miner found the hole. We re-cut the lock. *[JACOB: the repo has an operator mining folder. Decide the sentence before you walk on. "I have never bought Affine" is your line from 20 December 2025. Have the answer.]* Here is the machine. The base is thirty-five billion parameters, three billion active. Small. Fast. Ours to improve, not ours to have built. Every submission has to be a fine-tune of it. The base, on its own, codes at the level Anthropic's frontier coded a year ago. The base. Not our champion. The teacher is twenty-seven billion parameters, and it is frozen. The dataset is real agent work. A hundred and eighty-nine thousand steps. Coding, terminal, math, tool use. Five languages. Refreshed. The GPUs are rented on Lium and on Targon. Two other markets on the same chain. No account. No identity check. The miner wins if its reasoning sits close to the samples the teacher itself would have written. A distance. Not an LLM judge. Not a leaderboard. Submissions are private. Only a crowned model is published. Five paid slots. A seventy-two-hour payout rule. The rules have changed six times since the end of August, in public, with a date on each change. That is what a live market looks like. What moved. In June, after we switched the base, anonymous miners crowned five champions in five days. Nobody hired them. The token did. Since the reset, they have closed most of the distance to the teacher, on our score. *[JACOB: the king-score chart, or keep "most of the distance" with no number.]* The current king is public. Here is the address. [Slide: the Hugging Face path. Confirm the morning of the 28th.] Fifteen months ago I registered this subnet thirty-five minutes before I walked on stage in Paris. I said we would combine compute, inference, and a market into intelligence. The compute is Lium and Targon. The miners are strangers. The scorer was gamed, and re-cut, and gamed, and re-cut. The reward was the thing that moved. This is the receipt. This is what harnessing the exploit looks like. ## 12. The key — 41:00 — Which brings me to the thing I came here to put a date on. People ask whether this is decentralized. I am going to answer in three parts, the way you spec a machine. All three are true. They are not the same fact. **Production.** Decentralized. Permissionless. Concentrated, the way Bitcoin mining is concentrated. That concentration is acceptable. Entry is open. The threat of entry is the discipline. **Funding.** Decentralized by construction. The protocol pays. It is not a budget someone can close. Two million TAO have been moved by holders into markets they chose. And 47.5 percent of all TAO still sits on root. I am not going to round that. **Control.** Centralized. One key. I hold it. I used it. On the twenty-third of June I cut emissions to fifty-seven subnets in one afternoon, with a Discord post. My criteria, word for word: all subnets with no miner distribution, or no code. One was back within hours. Three are still off. It was the right call. It was also executive power. The second sentence does not excuse the first. In 2024 I promised proof of stake by the end of 2025. I missed. Block production is still a fixed set of foundation nodes. The new date is *[JACOB: the date. Blockworks says within about a year. Your June essay said about eighteen months. Pick the one you will say out loud.]*. I want to be held to it. There is no company on earth that can flip a switch and turn its own founder off. A stockpile of GPUs cannot. A chain can. On that date, this stops being a promise and becomes a property. The next year is three pieces of work, and each one is either dated or it is not in the plan. Bridge the subnet tokens out, canonical, so markets can be built on them off our chain. TAO already crosses to Solana with no wrapper. The subnet tokens are the unfinished half. Borrowing against the pool, so nobody can pump a signal without someone paid to bet the other way. I wrote that down in June. It has not shipped. And the key. You just heard the date. At four-thirty there is a debate on this stage. Protocol changes, too fast or too slow. You have my side. Tomorrow a lawyer will tell you what you actually own. Listen to that against what I just said. Ownership is the emission, the stake, the right to validate, the right to launch a market, and the weights the miners publish. The upgrade key is mine until the date. After the date it is nobody's. ## 13. Close — 44:00 — *[MEMORISE. No notes. One black slide.]* So. A new computing model. Incentive computing. The committee stopped. The exploit. We don't beat it. We harness it. Two supplies. One of them has no address. A hundred and twenty-eight markets. The people who build them are in this room. Affine. The receipt. One key. A date. [Slide: black. Two lines.] Bitcoin proved there can be money outside the state. Bittensor proves there can be a mind outside the state. Fifteen months ago, in Paris, I said I consider a success that I am not needed anymore. Tonight, the last thing I am still needed for has a date. I will step away. Thank you for letting me open Exploit. Go and see them. They are why this is not a slide. *[Stop. Do not add a thank-you slide speech. He ends on the city. You end on the room.]* --- ## What moved, against draft 2 The July story, the ten dates, Weber's syllabus, the fork, and the thermodynamics each shrink to one chapter-beat. They used to be the first twenty-five minutes. They are now the frame of the product, which is the order he uses for "wireless is built on foreign technology, therefore ARC." The chart, the row, and the cycle move from minute 27 to minute 2. He never makes the room wait half an hour for the thing he is selling. Affine stays parked, which you already do. The difference is that you park it the way he parks healthcare ("see Kimberly's keynote") and robotics: you name it, you withhold it, and the reveal is a machine with three caveats, not a moral. The key moves from a confession near the end to the announcement. In his keynote the sentence "today we are announcing" is the highest-energy line in every chapter. Your only true announcement is the date. Say it in that register. The June cut is the honest-limits beat inside the announcement, the way "it was insanely hard" sits inside his Rubin demo. It is not a separate apology chapter. The hand-forwards stay. They are his "Justin is somewhere in the room," and they are how an opening keynote owns the next two days without summarizing other people's talks. ## Still only you can say The named failure, twice (minute 4 and minute 26). The 35-to-4 entity. Whether Teutonic-II is live on the morning of the 28th. The Affine operator-mining sentence. The king-score chart or the words "most of the distance." The Hugging Face path. The date.