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.

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

Anthropic built Mythos, decided you can't have it. 40 companies can. This is what managed stagnation looks like.

solid tech, active dev work with hundreds of algos live and grant programs running. market access is massive - sits at intersection of AI compute, DeSci, and tokenized IP/algorithms. down 80% from ATH at $24M mcap though. price got hit hard but fundamentals stack - OPoW model, challenge owners live, vault mechanism preventing dilution. the TAM is absurd. AI infrastructure, decentralized compute, algorithmic licensing - trillions in efficiency gets redistributed if this works. Base ecosystem growing helps too. current price action rough but market it can access dwarfs the $24M valuation