Bittensor is making waves in the crypto industry with its innovative approach to artificial intelligence (AI). The platform's open-source infrastructure allows for collaborative globally distributed pre-training runs, which have achieved significant milestones. For instance, the largest such run was conducted by Covenant-72B, a model that was pre-trained on roughly 1.1 trillion tokens.
This shift towards decentralized AI has important implications for the industry. It shows that capital and technology are reinforcing each other, making it possible for institutions to underwrite decentralized AI projects. This is a significant development, as it marks the first time that decentralized AI has become a plausible, profitable, and contestable option.
However, the success of Bittensor and similar platforms also raises questions about governance. While they promise open participation and market-based incentives, their decentralization is not measured by who can contribute compute alone. It is also important to consider who can shape rules, steer upgrades, control distribution, and capture economics.