The CEOs of the world’s most valuable companies are just now catching up to what @tigfoundation’s @Dr_JohnFletcher has been saying for months. In conversation with @BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Microsoft CEO @satyanadella noted: "If you're not able to embed the tacit knowledge of the firm in a set of weights in a model that you control, by definition you have no sovereignty." “It’s fascinating that no one is talking about [this].”, he says. All it reveals is that he’s never met @Dr_JohnFletcher. $TIG anticipated this dilemma and has prepared accordingly by crafting a proven, open source alternative for computational science. They are, as per usual, way ahead of the curve. As John explained in his most recent essay, Google’s been prepping for this by collating as much expert tacit knowledge as they can get their hands on. Left uncontested, they will eviscerate their competitors and develop a monopoly on science itself. $TIG is, as I’ve been saying for years, the only thing that can prevent this from happening. 2026 is going to be interesting.

Andrej, I’m John Fletcher. I have a PhD in mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge, and since 2016 I have been working full-time on the problem of how to coordinate untrusted distributed compute for algorithmic innovation. I listened to your No Priors conversation and recognised the architecture you were describing: commits that build on each other, computational asymmetry (hard to find, cheap to verify), an untrusted pool of workers collaborating through a blockchain-like structure. The result is The Innovation Game (TIG), which has been in continuous operation since mid-2024. The correspondence is so close that I thought it worth writing. The short version: roughly 7,000 Benchmarkers test algorithms submitted by Innovators by solving instances of asymmetric computational challenges (SAT, Vehicle Routing, Quadratic Knapsack, Vector Search, among others). This testing is "proof of work" in the technical sense of Dwork and Naor (1992). Innovators earn rewards proportional to adoption by the Benchmarkers. The repository of algorithms is open source (github.com/tig-foundation/ti…). The system is already producing state-of-the-art results. For the Quadratic Knapsack Problem, 476 iterative submissions by independent contributors brought solution quality to a level that now exceeds methods published by Hochbaum et al. in the European Journal of Operational Research (2025). We are working with Thibaut Vidal (Polytechnique Montréal), who has submitted a state-of-the-art vehicle routing algorithm directly to TIG, and with Yuji Nakatsukasa (Oxford) and Dario Paccagnan (Imperial College London), among many others. One of TIG’s active challenges is directly relevant to your autoresearch work: an optimiser for neural network training (play.tig.foundation/challeng…), where Innovators compete to develop an improved optimiser (see screenshot). One way in which TIG extends the vision is on the economic side. In our view, a monetary incentive is required, otherwise the open strand simply cannot compete at scale. TIG’s open source dual licensing model (designed by my co-founder Philip David, who was General Counsel at Arm Holdings for over a decade, and was the artchitect of ARMs licensing strategy) is intended to solve that problem. I expect we have each thought about parts of this that the other hasn’t. Happy to talk whenever suits. John Fletcher tig.foundation

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.

As a result of a US government directive, we are suspending access to Claude Fable 5 for all users. You can continue to use all other Claude models. Here’s what this means for you: Across Claude products, new sessions will run on your selected default model or Opus 4.8, and existing Fable 5 sessions will end with an error. On the Claude Platform, requests to Fable 5 will also return an error. Please update your integrations to other Claude models. We know this is a disruption to your workflows; we appreciate your patience and support.

Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use. Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.

We demonstrated our AI-agent framework for massively collaborative algorithm discovery for the first time yesterday Using the TIG Vehicle Routing Challenge (collaboration with @StevenDiam77921) The TIG team had the pleasure of presenting to some of the biggest players in the AI-algorithm discovery space They learned they can mine for algorithms, monetise the outputs through TIG, while keeping the algorithms open for others to build on and improve Minds were blown Details to follow

Ran it to 505k brother. 😎