Tokens on the Bittensor network are soaring as the Opentensor Foundation, the organization that developed the protocol, hopes to provide an open-source alternative amid the artificial intelligence arms race.
Bittensor’s $TAO token has risen more than 90% in the past two weeks and surpassed $3 billion in market capitalization on Tuesday, according to The Block’s pricing page. The token is up 12% and trading at $482.39 as of 12:51 PM ET, according to CoinGecko.
About a week ago, Ethereum founder Vitalek Buterin appeared to express his support for Bittensor. In a blog post, Buterin said Bittensor offers an opportunity to encourage the creation of better AI by providing financial incentives. “Using crypto incentives to incentivize the creation of better AI” can be done without going down the rabbit hole of using crypto to fully encrypt, he said. “Approaches like Bittensor fall into this category,” he wrote.
At a macro level, the intersection of AI and blockchain appears to be complementary. Blockchain could provide a way to curb some of the threats posed by artificial intelligence, for example by ensuring that the data used in large-scale language models is trustworthy. At the same time, many technology thought leaders fear a world in which closed, centralized companies like OpenAI and Google wield disproportionate control over how the most powerful and dangerous technologies of the 21st century are deployed.
Reward Open Source AI Developers
The Opentensor Foundation aspires to protect against the risks of a few companies dominating AI by encouraging open source development of fast-growing technologies through financial incentives.
“Bittensor has created a global, decentralized, incentivized machine learning system that interconnects the Internet’s neural networks and rewards high-performance AI tools with cryptocurrency,” according to a statement. “While AI developers using Bittensor are financially rewarded for creating useful AI models, it discourages AI developers from creating models that are poorly built or do not solve real-world problems.”
According to Ala Shaabana, co-founder and COO of the Opentensor Foundation, the network encourages competition among developers. “People in the system will compete with each other to provide the best possible outcome,” he told The Block. “If I do better than you, I will be rewarded more because my model does better.”
According to the network’s website, Bittensor has nearly 70,000 active accounts and has issued approximately 5.8 million $TAO tokens.
Bittensor’s incentive mechanism rewards “honestly chosen weights,” so the system can “prevent collusion on up to 50% of the network weight,” according to the network’s white paper. “The result is a collectively run intelligence marketplace that continuously produces newly trained models and pays contributors who create information-theoretic value.”
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