Joseph Jacks’ Personal Blog

The AI founder I’m most inspired by on nearly a daily basis over the last year is Jake Steeves (@const_reborn), father of Bittensor.

Jake is a former Google Brain engineer who achieved enlightenment and went all in on the blockchain over a decade ago.

Instead of easily joining or founding a closed and heavily VC-funded foundation model startup, Jake decided to commit to a different path… one that would change the course of his life and, over time, everyone else’s forever.

In 2016, Jake conceived of the idea for creating a type of specialized blockchain engineered to scalably train and run AI models of all kinds, sizes, levels of sophistication and purpose… without censorship… without discrimination… and one of the fundamental aspects of this system would lie in how it incentivizes the production of better and better intelligences for the benefit of all species — even ones that may ultimately replace us humble humans.

In 2020, the Bittensor paper was released.

In January 2021, the network went live and the first $TAO (native currency of Bittensor) started to get minted.

A handful of very early believers like @BarrySilbert and some others invested in the project at the very early stages of its development — I personally invested in early 2023.

Jake has brought together a community of deeply philosophically aligned believers — the mission they are on is deeply profound … create robust and incorruptible systems that enable open source and permissionless AI (and AGI + ASI + whatever other goal-post-moving acronyms materialize from here) in a way that truly does ensure equal opportunity and access to the best intelligences possible in all domains.

This last year brought on high levels of awareness and participation across a broad set of stakeholders, miners, developers, end users, speculators, analysts and researchers all working toward the same mission: make AI a sustainable common good.

I’m extremely excited about the future of this project and this is absolutely not investment advice, but you should go out and figure out how to acquire some $TAO. Then do yourself a favor and hold it forever.