# Cointelegraph live from Proof of Talk: "Hype or Bust? How to dominate AI with web3"

- Title: Hype or Bust? How to dominate ai with web3 - Jacob Robert Steeves, co-founder of Bittensor
- Channel: Cointelegraph (host: Gareth Jenkinson, head of multimedia)
- Date: 10 June 2025 (live from Proof of Talk, Paris)
- Length: 23:58
- URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwKzDUxMz0U
- Jacob's start offset: none given; Jacob speaks from about 1:10 after the host's intro
- Method: YouTube blocked every direct route from this VM (yt-dlp with PO tokens, youtube-transcript-api, Invidious, Piped, cobalt). The auto-caption text was read from a rendered copy of the public watch page. No audio was available, so timestamps below are estimated from position in the caption text and marked "≈".
- Format: this is a research transcript, not a word-for-word copy. Host questions are paraphrased. Jacob's key lines are quoted verbatim (auto-caption spelling cleaned: "Bit Tensor" → Bittensor, "Alisium" → Elysium).
- Speakers: HOST = Gareth Jenkinson; JACOB = Jacob Steeves.

## Outline with timestamps

≈0:00 Cold open, mid-conversation. Jacob explains why he lives in Peru: he could not leave during the pandemic, got a dog, then a wife, and stayed. "It turned out to be a really good idea actually."

≈0:20 HOST introduces the live stream, invites viewer questions, sets a 20-minute limit (he has a panel at 2:00).

≈1:10 HOST: philosophical opener. Why did you build Bittensor, what does it solve, why does the world need it when AI tools move so fast?

≈1:30 JACOB answers with a story from Google Brain. He was asked to generate images to hide inside ad watermarks to raise click-through. His words: "it's like massive subliminal messaging." He calls it a gray area that law cannot even measure, and says: "I kind of think that that was wrong."

≈2:30 JACOB generalises: the problem is the structure a technology sits inside. Corporations have clear incentives; "at first the heroes and then the villains" because of fiduciary duty to maximise quarterly money. Ethical slips happen because "I'm part of a system and this is how I'm going to feed my kids."

≈3:20 JACOB on why build in the open. Decentralisation means many people can own the technology, it is "democratically owned," permissionless, "not something that's in a walled garden." Decentralised systems must also be transparent, like law you can inspect. Key line: "it's essential for us to build this incredibly important technology out in the open so people can see and understand where the incentives are, so they can participate, so they can own."

≈4:30 JACOB on ownership as symbiosis: "I own this technology um viscerally the machines work for me because I hold this token." He calls AI "this like secondary organ or organism."

≈5:10 JACOB contrasts with Silicon Valley's safety framing. The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI "want to control the technology as much as they can." "They're aggregating the control and they're doing it because it's for your best interest, you know. But is it? Probably not."

≈5:50 JACOB on UBI and fiat. Altman proposes UBI. Crypto people "understand money." "If I'm playing your game and you can just mint currency, you have all the control." Bitcoin's 15 years show people "run towards truth, run towards a system which cannot be manipulated in the favor of the people that hold the keys."

≈6:50 JACOB rejects the doom story: "the AIs are going to launch the nukes... I don't think that's going to happen at all." If it does, it is centuries away and we go through something else first.

≈7:10 JACOB: "Have you ever seen the movie Elysium?" A world of haves and have-nots where the haves get first-class access to the best models, control them, and all value accrues to them, "and they're giving you basically peanuts for a UBI with an orb."

≈7:40 JACOB: "the most liberating and freedom technology that we've ever invented, which is Bitcoin, and we merge it with the machine." We have "affinity with the machines," "a form of like symbiosis."

≈8:10 HOST: explain Bittensor briefly; why a native token; why not build on Bitcoin for payments?

≈8:30 JACOB: he tried to build on Lightning originally. Bitcoin is "a supercomputer that uses hashes to secure the network," a commodity system, and more abstractly "a perfect market where anybody around the world can plug themselves in." Bittensor abstracts that: nodes do work, work is validated, digital commodities for AI are extracted. Line: "if your AI sucks doesn't matter if it's decentralized." Token was needed to bootstrap; "lightning doesn't catch any fire and there's no market that can be created." Bitcoin tokenomics chosen because "it's most understood in this industry and I think it's the most fair."

≈10:30 HOST: disappointed you could not do it on Lightning? You are a Bitcoin maxi at heart.

≈10:50 JACOB: if he had to destroy Bittensor to save Bitcoin, he would, because "what we're doing can't be achieved without the shield to the industry that is Bitcoin." The whitepaper "is so seminal it's almost religious." "We exist as like a continent on the inside of the world generated by Bitcoin rather than some sort of competitor." "Bitcoin is the United States and you're a state inside of the Bitcoin universe." Praises toxic maximalism as "a defense mechanism for the industry."

≈12:40 Viewer question: which coins will buy groceries?

≈12:50 JACOB: not his vision. "Using Bitcoin to buy a coffee is like flying a fighter jet to the corner store." Bitcoin is geopolitical technology and a store of value. "Definitely don't buy coffee with TAO. It doesn't make any sense." He thinks crypto is "teaching governments what money is."

≈14:10 HOST: how does a decentralised protocol compete with ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Grok?

≈14:30 JACOB uses xAI as the example: they bought a billion-dollar data centre and produced competitive models because they had the money. To produce "this pinnacle element of intelligence" you must focus on the sub-commodities. Bittensor is "a set of interlinked hyper-digital commodity systems" that scale horizontally at each layer: compute cheaper than corporations, geographically decentralised compute markets, decentralised training on top, plus storage and bandwidth. Claims: inference "scaling faster than Google," beating Google AutoML on subnet 56 (Gradients), storage "like Filecoin" at lower cost. Line: "at a certain point they're going to have to look at us and go, oh shit." He announces he is launching a subnet for higher-order ML problems such as reinforcement learning: "that's really where we're unstoppable."

≈17:40 HOST: why does Elon Musk not just deploy subnets on Bittensor?

≈17:50 JACOB: "I'd love it if they did." Crypto carries stigma; "our industry has gone through a crisis in terms of our mission." Bittensor answers with real technology, papers, margins. "I don't care if Google puts their compute on Bittensor, that's fantastic." Message to other decentralised-AI projects: "let's co-mine, let's work together."

≈19:40 Viewer question on security and storage when AIs pay AIs.

≈19:50 JACOB: Bittensor is "no longer a single company upgrading our protocol"; competing subnet teams upgrade it. Trusted execution environments arrived on subnets as soon as they were possible. TEEs give privacy "more private than the corporations that are claiming privacy because we can actually say that cryptographically." Names Chutes and Targon (subnet 4, largest co-located set of GPUs doing trusted computing). Line: "why would you trust a corporation? Why don't you just trust cryptography? Don't trust, verify."

≈21:40 HOST asks for a parting thought on why people should use decentralised AI.

≈21:50 JACOB: they started long ago "for the right reasons" and "made a point of not owning the entire thing." Closing lines: "Own Bittensor. Don't come work for Bittensor. Come own Bittensor. Come and be Bittensor." The foundation "is being pulled out." Example: Chutes' founder showed up a year ago and now his subnet token is about 25% of TAO, so he will own a large share of the network. On dTAO: "how do we give more of this control away while maintaining property rights but ensuring that new people can come and really just like take my job." Ends: "I just launched a subnet, so I'm down in the trenches... don't come compete because I want to beat you."

≈23:20 HOST wraps and plugs the rest of the stream.

## Jacob's stage-worthy lines (verbatim, auto-caption source)

- "if your AI sucks doesn't matter if it's decentralized." (≈9:30)
- "Bitcoin is the United States and you're a state inside of the Bitcoin universe." (≈11:30)
- "using Bitcoin to buy a coffee is like flying a fighter jet to the corner store." (≈12:50)
- "why would you trust a corporation? Why don't you just trust cryptography? Don't trust, verify." (≈21:10)
- "Own Bittensor. Don't come work for Bittensor. Come own Bittensor. Come and be Bittensor." (≈22:00)
- "they're giving you basically peanuts for a UBI with an orb." (≈7:30)