Sat down with Bittensor co-founder Jacob Steeves (Const) for a deep dive into the state of Bittensor in 2026. We covered how Subnet 3 trained a 72B parameter model in a fully permissionless decentralized way, how subnets create markets for digital commodities like gradients and inference, the dynamic TAO tokenomics that lock emissions into subnet liquidity pools, and why open ownership of AI matters more than ever as centralized labs head toward trillion-dollar IPOs.
0:00 Intro: Bittensor Co-Founder Jacob Steeves
1:13 Jacob's Background, From Deep Learning to Crypto
4:45 Founding Bittensor: The Monetary Computer
7:58 How Subnets Work as Markets for Digital Commodities
11:18 Subnet 3: Decentralized Model Training
15:28 Permissionless Training at Internet Scale
18:52 Why This Matters: Open Source AI Ownership
25:53 Subnet Tour: Optimization, Inference, and Compute
29:55 Affine: Beating Qwen 30B via Market Incentives
34:26 TAO Tokenomics and Dynamic TAO
51:54 How Investors Participate: Just Buy TAO
54:05 Open Ownership vs Fiat AI