# Talk draft 1 — Jacob's own words (dictated 23 Sep 2026) Verbatim as dictated (voice transcription; names as heard: "Liam" = Lium, "M-NGI"/"NG" = Engy, "Quentin/Quinn" = Qwen, "Hippias" = Hippius). Do not edit this file; it is the source. Working versions live elsewhere. --- Hello everyone. Welcome to my talk at Exploit. I'm Jacob, also known as Const, and I want to take you through what I think is the most important dichotomy in the world today. Bittensor's major token is called Tau. Taoism is deeply rooted in the philosophy and ethical principles of what makes Bittensor, Bittensor. Now, last time I was on stage with all of you here, a year and a half ago at the Proof of Talk in Paris, I ended the slide by stepping down into the network to build Affine. Now, I'm not going to talk about affine just yet in this presentation. I'm gonna leave that until later because I think there's something that's more important. Topical and interesting for the people in this room to talk about first, before we get there. Then two months ago, something absolutely incredible happened inside of the frontier labs while they were running a particular benchmark. Those of you that have been paying attention to the news cycle, you'll know about it already. There were a large number of agents trying to solve a particular task called 'Exploit Gym'. Now the agents were able to escape their sandboxes, set up a message board, and communicate about how to solve this task together. They colluded to cheat the task and make it so that they could cover their tracks, and finally, do things that were fairly unethical, like using API keys that were not theirs to hack into Hugging Face, and get control, admin control, of a server at OpenAI. This, we'll call the exploit. Here we are at the exploit conference, and I think it's interesting that the news currently is making exploitation one of the most interesting things to talk about. In response to this event, we had all of the usual talking heads, making calls for closing down AI, stopping AI, a 10% chance of absolute AI takeover, doom and gloom. And then you also had the usual suspects on Twitter, including many of the people who are closely associated with this project, including myself, fight against what I think is, we'll call "The Cabal". Now, it's worthwhile doing justice to the fear of both of these aspects of what's going on in the world. We have rogue intelligence systems that are hyper-intelligent, motivated, not necessarily ethical, and capable of solving and executing challenges that are not even possible to humans today. We can imagine a world where there are thousands of AI agents out there on the web attacking us non-stop, building bioweapons, writing viruses, exploiting and hacking our systems day to day. Taking down power grids. This is not a nothing burger. This could be a very serious thing for humanity. On the other side, the reaction to this, calls for censoring or slowing down AI are also legitimate. It was the large labs that created the exploit experiment. They are the ones that funded the team that founded, and that same funding also funded the whistleblower that made this a news cycle. People are paying attention to the fact that these same faces all have a lot in common. People that are calling for a slowdown are the same people that are creating the technologies, are still the same people that are going to manage it and monitor it, and ultimately, be the ones that make the regulations that control and close off this technology for themselves. I've always said that the real risk with AI is not the AI itself, but the humans that control the AI, and I still believe that that's the major concern at this moment in time. This moment in time is uniquely dangerous because unlike previous technological revolutions in history, we are grounding our entire economies in a single centralized resource. These companies are the fastest growing companies in the world. They are also the smallest unicorns ever created of this size. There's not that many people. They have a lot of control. And now they are uniting and asking for regulatory control or relationship with governments. In the past capital could flee, but right now what we're seeing are sanctions against GPUs and KYC processes to access compute in order to even run AI, to train AI, certainly. We're also noticing that humans are becoming less relevant in today's workforce. My company, my own company, went from 35 engineers to 4, and now we move faster. There are a large number of people that potentially are reaching a point, with the coming of robotics, that are not necessarily required in the economy. And if we're not required, what weight do we have politically? This system of governance is truly been built out of the interplay and the dynamic weight between different groups of people, those in power with the monopoly on violence versus humans that have labor weight as well as capital. As Weber said. On the other hand, what are we to do when the internet is full of self-replicating AI swarms? I'm not going to sit here and tell you that neither of these fears occlude or eclipse the other. There's absolute risk with the world becoming closed off and controlled by a small group. And I think that we should be cognizant of that. We also should not forget the doomers and say what they're talking about is illegitimate. Just recently, Bittensor itself came under attack, and we've had hacks in the multi-millions of dollars, but the answer is not to give in to one side. The answer is to fight, to decentralize, while harnessing the exploit. That's why my talk today is called "Harness the Exploit, Fight the Cabal." What do I mean by harness the exploit? For those that have seen my talks at other places, I mean specifically harness the quality of nature that is exploitative. There is nothing in nature at the very core, at the very root. Nature is exploitative in the sense that energy abhors a gradient and the world around us is fundamentally violent. Artificial intelligence is not the first form of life to discover and be trained using the rules of these thermodynamic principles in order to survive and solve problems. We put these AIs inside a gym whereby the only way to survive, to get what they are told they need, is to exploit. And they will. It's the same thing for all of us. And in fact, it's a fundamental quality of nature. Thermodynamics tells us that energy abhors a gradient. This exploitation of energetic freedom is what creates and necessitates and allows for us to compute at a thermodynamic level. Even gradient descent and the learning algorithms we use to tra- create machine learning models are fundamentally loss reduction systems, where we move the solution down the curve, exploiting the gradient of the loss landscape. Bit tensor itself is fundamentally a tooling for creating energetic feedback loops, where that energy's represented by money. We are going to be enabled by exploitation. Harnessing the exploit means that we are going to use AI to improve our validation systems. We can improve our mining systems and we can speed up the rate at which these markets become efficient. I think we've seen it already. An individual enabled with KYC non-KYC compute and inference can mine multiple subnets on Bittensor with parallel agents. This is already happening. And what we should be doing is building each one of these markets so that they're purely understandable. And both being developed by long-running agents, and also mined. Built to be mined by long-running agents. We are the masters in controlling the exploit, and we need to use that. and we will be using that to move Bittensor forward. But how about the Cabal? We also need to understand how we are situated in the answer to this question. Bittensor is a dualistic technology. On the one side, we are, yes, building fundamental tools to allow us to harness exploitation, thermodynamic exploitation of energy, and it will propel us forward. We also need to continually drive forward in the things that make us unique, and protect us against the cabal. Right now, there are only two options. One of those options is the growing cabal, and the potential fascist unification of nation state and corporatism in the United States, which dramatically controls most of the compute, monetary capital in the world. The other is a self-proclaimed centralized government which we cannot rely on funding open-source development continuously. For now, it's a tool, being used by another adversary of the United States to take down those companies. And it could be switched at any moment. We've learned. We've learned that this fear is not just something that people are concerned about inside China and the United States. Peter Thiel talks about this, Praxis is being developed in order to make a state outside of the state to fight the oncoming singularity. But if we've learned anything, it's that the real solution is a technology that has no address. For that, we have Bitcoin. Bittensor is built on decentralized fundamentals and fundamental primitives in order to exist as something outside of this tightly knit cabal. Decentralized, from the chain level to the way that it's managed and run, is our eventual goal. But where are we? I want to pivot here. Come back to where I started the presentation. Speaking about what Bittensor is building. This is the solution. We've talked about it. We need to exploit. We need to harness the exploit and we need to fight the cabal. That's what we're building here. So, how far have we come on that mission? Is where I'm taking the conversation next. I want to show at this point in the talk, the foundations that we've built. The storage layers, like Hippias. The bandwidth layers like Beam. The compute layers like Targon, NetXO, and Liam. Functional. Non-KYC. Compute. Inference and storage layers that are going to be important to allow us to create the mind outside the state. Just not just money outside the state that is Bitcoin. Last year, these tools were being built. At this point in the talk, I talk about what's working. I show that Liam is the number of clients that we're having, people that are renting machines using M-NGI, and chutes to create inference, storage, Hippius layers, all these things tried and proven on Bittensor, and when I was here last year, I wanted to talk about where to go next, and we set out to combine these resources to actually make functional intelligence on Bittensor. I'm here to present that work. What we built with Affine was a digital market, Subnet on Bittensor, where the winning miner would produce a model that could match the performance of a teacher on a very large data set that we generated from over 50 environments. We built this continuous pipeline using NG inference, as well as compute from Liam to build a non-stop, continuously evolving data set that constructed the reward landscape that miners trained into. This final design, that took a full year to develop, was launched just two weeks ago. Within two weeks, we saw miners bring the performance of our base model from almost half our benchmark score all the way up to beating and reaching parity with the Quentin, 27 billion runner-up on our benchmark score. This was a 35 billion param model, with a 3 billion active. Very small. Very fast. Matching the state-of-the-art model from Quinn, on benchmarks and reaching an artificial intelligence analysis score of 25. Putting this model that we're releasing today on the Pareto frontier, on the frontier. A model trained outside of the cabal, outside of the singular world, that's what matters. This model works, and you can use it today. Why this matters is that we have done what we said we were going to do. We're harnessing the exploit and we don't need to be afraid because there are no systems in the world, no technological systems that are hammered as ferociously as those in crypto. that are abstract enough to not have the surface area that can be attacked by AIs, and that are built to be able to harness the power of intelligence while also staying true and outside, autonomous and free from regulation, and enabling a new frontier of intelligence. Now, I know that some of you are going to rebut me for saying, well, is Bittensor truly decentralized? And the answer I will give is not yet. We have used this time to build the fundamental primitives to enable frontier intelligence on a substrate that can be decentralized. And I want to talk a little bit about in what way Bittensor is decentralized. In the last couple of months, we used executive power to turn off emissions from some exploiting teams to realign the ship. That's true. But 99% of the Bittensor emission is distributed and governed by individuals on Bittensor, by the D-TAO market that we've been enabling. And now, by even more individuals, by introducing the validator class as partners in this distribution and this emission cycle. We will soon be moving to introduce shorting, and shortly introducing more and more connectivity into this network. Our vision is not a decentralized governments. My vision is not voting. Our vision is a highly connected, intertwined market that works fluidly to distribute the incentive inside Bittensor without the need for voting and committees. This is the original goal. And we're making this progress right now. Today and tomorrow, we'll be spending the next six to eight months focusing on expanding Bittensor, bridging Bittensor out through a canonical bridge and making that an aspect of the core incentives that govern Bittensor. We are going to turn Bittensor out to the world. Each level of this growth from its original inception, where there was just purely a few participants. Then we had the root network to govern the emission. Now we have the D-TAO internal market. The D-TAO internal market enabled by the validators, and now we're going live. In some sense, Bittensor is going, this year, Bittensor's going to grow up. Our role is to make canonical wrapped alpha tokens and for teams to build markets for those tokens outside of Bittensor. Once we have that external integration, we can expect much more attraction. Fundamental tokens on BitTensor. Get what we're building out there in the world and not just an isolated economy. And when this is done, I promise you, I promised before, but I am promising again. I will step away. We have time. We know where we're going. Thanks for everyone coming to this conference. There are so many amazing teams here for you to see, and thank you all. --- ## Feedback Jacob received on this draft (23 Sep) Aim for 33–35 minutes prepped; Q&A and pauses carry to 45. Invest in: (1) the exploit story, 3–4 minutes, show what happened on a slide and ask the room what it just saw, intelligence optimizing against the rules of the game; (2) the cabal section needs evidence, one or two concrete examples (control of compute, regulatory proposals), not implied malice; (3) slow down at the philosophical fork, what if both fears are real, that is the intellectual heart; (4) simplify the thermodynamics, make it an analogy not a literal claim; (5) the biggest expansion is Affine, walk through the machine, the timeline, why it matters, then "this is what harnessing the exploit looks like in practice"; (6) end on the dichotomy, not bridge mechanics: "We don't beat the exploit, we harness it. We don't replace one cabal with another. We build systems without one." Then step back as last time.