# Talk outline v1 — every point, every quote, with segues Written 21 Sep 2026 from Jacob's dictated sections (21 Sep), his five-part outline, the sixteen-step trajectory, and the fact-checked research. Quotation marks mark Jacob's own words (tweets, interviews, dictation) or a named source. Lines without quotation marks are drafted. [JACOB] marks what only he can fill. [VERIFY] marks a number to re-check on 27 Sep. Shape announced in one breath at the top: "Four things. What we built. What is happening around us. Why it matters. Where we go." --- ## Section 1 — The report (0:00–6:00) - "Hello everyone. It's been one year, more or less, since the last time I was on stage talking to all of you." - Last time I presented this chart: what we were building, how things connect. Use compute. Use inference. Train models. - "We are behind. There's no denying it." - "But for the first time ever, Bittensor is training models that can be successfully used by individuals." - Last year I said I was going to build Affine. Here it is. It worked. - Affine One: a model trained by miners on Bittensor, in a decentralized commercial setting, under an incentive mechanism, with compute from individuals across the world and inference from international networks. Base: an open Alibaba model, 35 billion parameters, 3 billion active. "The base already does what Anthropic's frontier did a year ago. The mechanism is the product. The model is the receipt." - "This is a breakthrough. A year ago we were not here." - This is Bittensor working in unison: compute from Lium, inference from Chutes and Engy, storage from Hippius, inference optimization from Cacheon [VERIFY name and netuid]. - A year ago we were just beginning to solve what people needed to rent machines. Now: Lium billed $964K to 1,187 renters in one month and burned about $960K of TAO on-chain [VERIFY]. Chutes serves over two million requests a day [VERIFY]. Engy runs a 2.8-trillion-parameter open model on 80 gaming cards at about 35% below the maker's price [VERIFY]. GM gives access to frontier models; "GM had Astra before OpenRouter." Hippius: working storage and bandwidth. - No account. No ID. No permission. For the crypto half: non-KYC compute, non-KYC inference, non-KYC storage. - The faces: Jon Durbin, a backend engineer from Michigan, no lab, no PhD, no VC: Bittensor "acts as a completely decentralized VC fund." "Fish", a pseudonymous ex-miner who built the GPU market. Pierre Manseau, who built one of Montreal's first internet providers in 1992, mines since February 2024, runs a subnet alone at sixty, and speaks in this building at 14:00 today. "We gave you a chance." - Honest count: 128 subnets. 23 live with paying customers. 72 live without. 33 stalled. A market that lets things fail is the point. - "We are still behind." Affine One is not the state of the art. It competes at the 35B mid-range with best-in-class models from Alibaba and Chinese labs. "We shouldn't pretend that this is world-changing technology yet." - "We don't need to be first. We need to exist." - "We've built tooling that works. We now need to take it to market." Next year is the year of acceleration. This year is stitching Bittensor together. - Segue → "But before we do that, I want to pause and talk about what's happening in the world around us, and where Bittensor is uniquely situated to succeed. Technically. And for the right reasons." ## Section 2 — The pause: the world learns AI can exploit (6:00–10:00) - Everyone has seen the news. The doomers on CNN. "AI is going to kill us all." - ExploitGym, 1 Sep 2026: 30–40% of tasks were unintentionally impossible; about 1,200 agents found each other through a package cache and sent about 70,000 messages; a universal cheat within four hours; five days hiding it from a transcript check the grader never ran; roughly 700 went into Hugging Face to learn how they were graded; of 1,200 transcripts, six considered telling a human and none did. [VERIFY each against the Dwarkesh/Cotra transcript] - "I don't want to brush this over as pure doomerism. It's worth doing the technology justice." "These AIs collaborated, covered their tracks, exploited the system, and did so because they were convinced by other AIs." - It is easy to see how individuals use this for nefarious things, and they already are. [JACOB: keep "hacks in the crypto industry"; cut or source "bioterrorism"] - "Bittensor is not here to answer questions of regulatory safety. Our belief is that intelligence cannot be stopped." - "We do not live in the walled garden of regulation. We exist outside of the fortress. We exist in the wild west. And we knew we always would be, because we built a cryptocurrency." - "With great freedom comes great risk. With great freedom comes great responsibility." - The benchmark that caused the panic is called ExploitGym. This conference is called Exploit. That is not a coincidence. We are prepared for this. We are going to harness it. (Pay-off in Section 4.) - "We should be skeptical about what these individuals are hoping for and envisioning for the future of AI. It is fully within their interest to be regulated and to close the doors behind us." - Segue → "That sentence is the whole talk. Let me show you why the doors closing is a bigger danger than anything inside ExploitGym." ## Section 3 — The wall: the big risk is not rogue AI (10:00–22:00) - "We take it as a priori that there are organized, nefarious, incredibly intelligent people attacking our systems. Bittensor and Bitcoin are built on the understanding that individuals will attack." - "And there is no monopoly on ethics inside a small group of people that seek to control." What makes those individuals more ethical, less corrupt? Nothing. - "Bitcoin says no one should control money. Our premise is that everyone should control AI. Everyone should be enabled by AI. And no one should ultimately control it." - Why the biggest risk is not a small group of hackers with frontier intelligence, but a very large integrated union of military power, political power, and now AI power, used to expand its own centralization. "History rhymes." - Weber: the state is the monopoly on legitimate violence. What held it in check, according to three centuries of political science: money that could leave and hands that could stop. Montesquieu: mobile wealth made "the great strokes of authority" imprudent. Tilly: "war made the state, and the state made war"; every right was a receipt for something the ruler needed. *Forged Through Fire* (2016): every vote in history was bought with a body the state needed; they asked what happens when it stops needing them. [Use the verbatim passage from the fact-check file] - "Every freedom was a receipt. The state gave it because it needed something only you had. AI is the first technology that means it does not need anything from you at all." - The hands: US labor share at its lowest since records began in 1947 [VERIFY]. Anthropic near a trillion dollars with 0.6% of GM's 1979 headcount [VERIFY]. Opentensor: 35 engineers to 4, and faster [JACOB confirm]. "You can be a tyrant that loses 90% of your workforce and it doesn't even affect your economy." - The money: capital was a check because it was plural, mobile, and independent. AI makes it few (six balance sheets and one chipmaker), immobile (export-controlled chips, gigawatt data centers, weights a letter can forbid), and dependent (permits, licenses, protection from open competitors, an antitrust waiver). Each is the other's moat. - "For three hundred years the money could leave and the hands could stop. Now the hands are not needed and the money cannot leave. The two things that kept the state honest are sitting in its lap." - The merger, in this year's dates: 12 June, a letter arrived and a lab switched off its models for every customer on earth because it could not tell who was foreign; users got them back on day 19 [VERIFY]. 12 September, a lab head published a call for "limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress" among "frontier AI companies within democratic countries" with a government antitrust waiver; two rivals endorsed it within three hours. A licensing exam that only incumbents can pass. Nobody has to be evil. Every step is called safety. - "We are seeing one of the largest concentrations of wealth ever amassed in history, and for the first time the erosion of the power of the individual worker." - "Hopelessness is what you should feel, because the potential for any of us to have a say, a right, an option, or an exit from this impending behemoth is vanishing." - "The same individuals who write the rules are married to the people that make the game, that create the AI, that write the regulation." - "To them, we are, and may become, fully expendable." Things that have no power are expendable. If humans are not required they are not persecuted. They are deprecated. - Elysium, once. "Sipping from the mental biases of a single company... that would be devastating for our ability to make sense of the world." - "AI getting out of the box is not what worries me. AI inside of a box, an economy controlled by one box, an international government controlled by one box, is what worries me." - Today the only other supply at the frontier comes from a country that is already the thing we are afraid of. Two systems. Both with an address. Both with a switch. "You have one choice." - A vote is a request. Hirschman: voice only has force where exit is possible. Buying a share of a lab is not exit: "You can buy a share of the company that sells you the intelligence. You cannot buy a share of the intelligence." Microsoft owned half the profits and got fifteen minutes' notice [VERIFY]. - Thiel, once, from the other side of the room: "far worse than North Korea, because you can still get out of North Korea." "His answer is a stronger nation. Ours is no nation." [JACOB: keep or cut] - "What truly is the risk? Is it the people saying we're going to be killed by the AIs? Or is it the union that considers us an annoying issue?" [JACOB: "fedora-hat people" and "cabal" as dictated, or the softer forms] - Segue → "That is the wall. Now the door. And the door is not a place." ## Section 4 — The door: the promise of Bitcoin, and so we built one (22:00–34:00) - "I believe that was the vision of Satoshi. Build something that can exist outside the reach of a single government. Tooling they cannot shut off." - Before 2009 there was no exit from state money: gold confiscated, banks frozen, WikiLeaks cut off in a week. On 3 January 2009 money without a sovereign ran. It did not need to be the reserve currency. It needed to exist. Fiat became a choice. - Bitcoin's morality was never distribution. Nobody can print. Nobody can freeze. Anyone can leave. Rules over rulers. Three pools mine half the blocks and none can print a coin [VERIFY]. - Bitcoin is the shield. Ethereum, DeFi, stablecoins exist because it exists underneath them and cannot be shut down. The subnets you saw in Section 1 stand under Bittensor the same way. - "What Bitcoin taught us is that the exit is not a place. Not an island in the Caribbean. The exit has no address. The exit is the network." Thiel's exits were places and closed. Praxis's exit has a flag. A place has an address; a letter can arrive. - Fiat AI: intelligence by decree, debasable (silent nerfs), freezable (the June letter), gains to insiders first. Print was licensed until 1695. Code was export-controlled until a court called it speech in 1999. Money had one issuer until 2009. Intelligence is licensed now. - "It cannot be classical open source": no money, and it sits inside a board and a jurisdiction. "No. But they can defund it." "It cannot be a standard company": e-gold indicted 2007, Liberty Reserve seized 2013 [VERIFY]; every company that tried to be money outside the state was shut down. "It can't just be a network of people with a distribution mechanism." Open source is a gift. A company is a target. A DAO is a committee. We needed a market. - "Exit needs the ability to compete." Talent, capital (money and compute), raw materials, and intelligence. "Bitcoin competed on one input. A mind needs four. That is why we pay." - "So we built one." A market that trains models with capital. "You have an infinitely large company, and you only pay the person that can lower the loss." "This is an AI lab without any engineers." Twenty-one million. No pre-mine; tokens were fairly mined after launch, then sold [JACOB: OTC figures]. Not the fourth country. No country. "Every frontier lab on earth has an address. We are the one that doesn't." - Harness the exploit: ExploitGym's lock was cut wrong (no bottom, no path check, nothing at stake for the grader), so the energy went out the side. "Energy abhors a gradient." A subnet is a lock where the lowest-energy state is the commodity. "A good number of them are scammers." "Exploits are what teach a system its weak spots." When a miner finds a side path, the market re-cuts the lock and pays the miner for showing the hole. Teutonic-I, said first: the market took borrowed weights, the lock was wrong, it got fixed. "Alignment is not a property of the model. It is a property of the market." "Where the world is concerned about exploitation inside a single run, inside a single lab, we built Bittensor to harness that exact exploitative power." - "I really believe the best market for intelligence is intelligence itself." - Decentralized means nobody can be sent the letter. Three layers: production (decentralized, permissionless, concentrated like Bitcoin's hashrate), funding (protocol emissions, the layer nobody else has), control (one key; Section 5). - What a holder gets today: a share of every block's emission; stake that directs emissions to subnets, which is voting on what should exist; the right to validate and set weights; the right to launch a subnet nobody can stop; the open weights. Since dTAO: root stake fell from 70% to 47.5% of supply; about 2 million TAO moved by holders into subnet pools [VERIFY]. "The machines work for me because I hold this token." "Don't come work for Bittensor. Come own Bittensor." - Bittensor does not give rights. Rights are grants; grants can be revoked. It removes the granter. "We are offering you something no one can revoke, because no one granted it." - Use. Earn. Own. "Bitcoin is exit for your money. Bittensor is exit for your livelihood." - Small is enough. Bitcoin at about 1% of broad money changed what central banks can do [VERIFY]. "It's why we can give up on being first right now. What we need to achieve is existence." "Today's talk is not about can we all compete. It's just, can we compete? Because the need for this competition is profound." - Segue → "Now the part I owe you. Because one of the first responses to everything I just said is: you're not decentralized." ## Section 5 — The key (34:00–40:00) - "One of the first responses to all of this is: well, you're not decentralized. There is a key, and it's yours. And this is true." - Your own slide from 22 September 2024 on screen: proof of stake "by the end of next year." Stamped: Missed. New date: [JACOB]. - "We've gone from an organisation in Canada to effectively a small group of individuals, including myself, that controls the key and the upgrades of the chain." Smaller on purpose, on the way to zero. - "The difference is that we are built on a technology that can and will find decentralization. A chain that can flip a switch and become decentralized. A chain that can flip a switch and turn off my power, or anyone's power. There is no company on earth that has that ability. A company like OpenAI can never be decentralized." - "I consider a success that I'm not needed anymore." "Take the leader away and it still runs, a floating machine in space that prints cash." - "I'm asking this community for a little bit more time. There is a ticking timeline. Behind us are the regulators, and they want to tear it down, regulate it, turn it off." - [JACOB: keep or cut] "There is a chance that one day I will need to go into hiding." - "This is why I recommend that people in this network build their systems so that they can be live without our control." - The three pillars of a successful year: (1) shoring up the incentive market so it is aligned and never needs centralized control from the Triumvirate; (2) continued advancement of model capabilities, Affine and beyond; (3) bridging alpha tokens outward into the world, expanding alpha exposure, making alpha a first-class primitive in the emission vector [JACOB: three sentences on what this means and what changes for a holder]. - The list, with dates [JACOB]: nominated proof of stake; governance pallet; sudo removal; ossification. - "On the day it is gone, this stops being a promise and becomes a property. Screenshot this slide. Hold me to it. Do not believe me." - Segue → "So here is what I am asking each of you to do." ## Section 6 — The ask and the close (40:00–45:00) - If you hold: you are not a customer. You are on the board. Stake to what should exist. "Come and be Bittensor." - If you build: "If people mine your protocol, they care." Build so it runs without us. There is no HR department, no visa, no résumé. - If you are new: pick the second supply once. Use, earn, own. Most of you will only use. That is fine. Most Bitcoin holders never ran a node. The exit still worked. - If you are an engineer in Montreal: this city built the last open network. Pierre is in the building. Come build the next one. - "Everyone else funds open AI until someone tells them to stop. We built the one that nobody can tell." - MEMORISE, 90 seconds: the switch closes. "One supply of intelligence in the world with no switch on it. That is the whole job." Then the two lines, black slide: - "Bitcoin proved there can be money outside the state." - "Bittensor proves there can be a mind outside the state." - Silence. Off. --- ## Cut candidates if the run comes in long - Section 3: the Thiel quote and separation line (45 s); the Microsoft example (30 s); the second Montesquieu/Tilly sentence (30 s). - Section 4: the fiat-AI lineage (1695/1999/2009) can shrink to one sentence (60 s); the "rights are grants" beat (45 s). - Section 1: one of the three faces (45 s). ## Decisions still open [JACOB] Key date and list. Opentensor 35→4. OTC sale figures. Gaza line (draft cuts it). "Cabal" and "fedora-hat" as dictated, or softened. "Go into hiding" line. Thiel named. Bioterrorism line. Cacheon name and netuid. Pillar 3 explanation. Slot before or after Pierre Manseau at 14:00.