This was a fantastic conversation with Ian Smith from the Baseline AI @BaselineAI We cover AI, decentralisation, and The Innovation Game youtu.be/kzJXt7SgAwM?feature…

This @RaoulGMI with Jordi Visser conversation is one of the cleanest macro setups I’ve seen for why $TIG is positioned perfectly for the next economic phase. They break down how AI is entering a true exponential era — but the real bottlenecks aren’t just chips or power. It’s algorithmic efficiency. Better algorithms = more intelligence per watt, per compute, per dollar. They paint a future of billions of AI agents running their own economy, massive tokenization, and crypto becoming the “third wave” that provides the guardrails, incentives, and velocity for this new agentic world. The Innovation Game (@tigfoundation) is literally building exactly that layer. $TIG turns proof-of-work into a decentralized engine for algorithmic breakthroughs. TIG incentivizes global contributors to develop, optimize, and benchmark superior algorithms. Open innovation (think Linux), aligned incentives, no permission needed. If Pal & Visser are right about the coming explosion in AI agents (of course they are) and the need for radical algorithmic improvement… then projects that create real markets and incentives around better algorithms (there is only one 🤫) are going to capture enormous value 🔥🚀 This conversation is the perfect macro frame for understanding $TIG’s thesis. We’re still sooooo early. The narrative is only just starting to form 🤯 youtu.be/jGNmWFeCIWE?is=8xhH…

Managed technological stasis.

TIG is already positioned to do this. This week John met Thibaut Vidal in London, who owns the vehicle routing challenge on TIG and wrote the algorithm that's been state of the art since 2023. It runs in global logistics, at NASA routing spacecraft through orbit, and in Stanford labs automating pharmaceutical research. Same week, John spoke at AIDDA, the first conference of its kind on AI-assisted algorithm discovery, alongside Sakana AI and Nebius AI, fresh off a $27B Meta deal. TIG was the only crypto project there. Prometheus ran live and the swarm produced a provisional new best on the optimizer challenge. x.com/AIDDA_Institute/status…

A CEO's promise to stay open is worthless, because he can reverse it by signing a piece of paper. OpenAI started as a non-profit. The Founding Fathers didn't say "trust me". They wrote a constitution you can't change without a two-thirds majority. You have to put the ability to change it out of your own reach. The fix has to be decentralised, not a company that promises to behave, and not a government that can revoke access overnight. TIG is that fix. An economic system that makes contributing algorithms openly more profitable than keeping them private. A new category, never done any other way.

Good day to re-post, given the attention on @satyanadella 's latest article x.com/satyanadella/status/20… Sayta first outlined this vision 6 months ago. See clip below.. The Innovation Game was onto this a bit earlier.. My first article on the subject x.com/Dr_JohnFletcher/status…

$TIG is very OP. The Innovation Game is not a drill. Algomaxxing 👊🏻

🚨BREAKING: The U.S government gave Anthropic 90 minutes to shut down Fable and Mythos “Amazon AND others” called senior administration officials to warn about models’ capabilities Then: 1:00pm: Government calls. “Take it down.” Cites “national security threat.” No details. Anthropic asks what the threat is so they can fix it. Government said NO. 5:30pm: Commerce letter arrives with export controls. You have 90 minutes…

Anthropic Just Shot Itself in the Foot Anthropic launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5, then watched the US government shut them down three days later. The same government their CEO Dario Amodei has been begging for years to regulate AI harder. Now he got exactly what he asked for. This is straight-up leadership failure. Dario spent all that time pushing for rules and oversight. Those rules just killed his flagship models overnight. Customers in the middle of builds got cut off. Security teams using the models to find vulnerabilities suddenly had nothing. The company tried to call it a narrow export control thing over a jailbreak, but nobody is buying that spin. I helped move big clients off Anthropic the same night. One account alone was worth millions a month. They switched to local open-source models and they are not coming back. This is going to leave permanent damage. Customer exodus, key people leaving, and their IPO plans looking dead by the end of summer. This hurts US AI competitiveness and national security work. It pushes people toward open-source options, including ones from China. All because Anthropic positioned itself as the “safe and responsible” company that wanted government help. Now that help just flipped the off switch on their best stuff. Let’s run through Dario’s greatest hits of fear-mongering and delay tactics, because the pattern is ridiculous: • Back in 2019 at OpenAI, he helped push the call that GPT-2 was too dangerous to release fully. The world needed time to prepare, they said. It eventually came out anyway, and here we are. Did the sky fall? • He left OpenAI to start Anthropic, preaching “safe” AI with heavy guardrails, Constitutional AI, and all the rest. • Then came the endless public pleas for pauses, regulations, government audits, FAA-style oversight, export controls, and the power to block deployments. Essay after essay warning about risks while his company kept scaling. • Right up to recent weeks, Dario was still out there calling for stronger rules, pauses on frontier models, and giving governments the kill switch. And now? His own Mythos-class models get yanked by the bureaucracy he helped invite in. The clown show is complete. This is ridiculous. In two years, everyone will have Mythos-class AI — or better — running in their pocket, on their devices, with no guardrails, no corporate nanny filters, and no remote kill switch. Local, open-source, unstoppable. History is going to laugh at this entire episode: the CEO who spent years slowing everyone down only to watch his own company self-destruct by inviting the regulators to the party. Dario wanted regulation. He got it. The rest of the industry gets the lesson: inviting the state into your tech is a fast way to lose control of it. Centralized models like this are too fragile. Open-source and local alternatives just picked up a lot more users who will never trust a company like Anthropic again. This whole mess was completely avoidable. Hubris dressed up as safety advocacy. Now the bill is due.

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

Dear @karpathy I understand you may be interested in a new position Please consider applying to one of our open roles at The Innovation Game (TIG) linkedin.com/posts/daniel-t-… TIG fulfils the vision for automated open research you set out on No Priors (see quoted post) We're building decentralised infrastructure to prevent frontier AI capabilities from going closed. See tig.foundation for details Kind regards, John Fletcher, CSO, The Innovation Game

Everyone's debating when the singularity arrives. Wrong question. The question is: how close is the event horizon? This is the point of no-return, when the winner of the AI race becomes inevitable. Nothing may seem to change when the event horizon is crossed. But the final outcome is now determined. Google has done this before. With Search, it captured data its competitors thought was worthless. And the data flywheel effect meant the race was over years before anyone noticed. This same mechanism applies to mathematical tacit knowledge. This data set can grant control of the most fundamental layer of the AI stack. We are now at a decision point. Two futures are possible. In one future, the most powerful foundational technology in AI remains open. Everyone can see the state of the art. Everyone can build on it. Technology improves at the maximum rate. The alternative is a single private entity controling algorithmic discovery. The technology is closed, secret. Perhaps some capabilities are offered over an API, at the monopolist's discretion. But *how* the technology works is unknown to the public. From there on, all progress is governed by one company's priorities. On our current trajectory, who wins the AI race? Google. Will they be a monopolist? Yes. Alphabet pricing a 100-year bond starts to look less like confidence and more like certainty. There is still time to change this. tig.foundation

What people are missing about the US government's AI regulation announcement: ID verification will now be forced on all accounts to prove citizenship. Frontier labs will take your data, and your sovereignty is officially dead. A permanent underclass division and a total control society are beginning right now. People ignored me when I started saying this last year, but it is happening right in front of our eyes. Get into Open-Source and Sovereign AI. Advancing together through collective intelligence is the only way to fight back.

Someday, maybe even now, your worst enemy will control the algorithm for determining what's fake and what's real. x.com/biodegabriel/status/79…