Bittensor Keynote @ Imperial

​Jacob Steeves, co-founder of Bittensor, will discuss the philosophical foundations of the protocol and why decentralized AI matters in a world where AI inherently centralizes power. Drawing on the lessons of Bitcoin, he will show how mining primitives can be expanded into a general framework for coordinating valuable work on Bittensor, and why open, permissionless incentives are more orders of magnitude powerful than traditional organizational models for humanity. Through concrete case studies of frontier research being built on the network, Jacob will illustrate how Bittensor is advancing the state of the art today, before closing with a practical look at how students and new contributors can participate in building the future of open intelligence.

Jacob Steeves, is the co-founder of Bittensor, an open-source protocol for decentralized machine learning. A builder at the intersection of AI, crypto, and open-source systems, he has helped shape a new model for coordinating intelligence through incentives rather than centralized platforms. Jacob now operates multiple subnets on the bittensor network, using autoresearch agents to push the frontier in RL, distilation, and coding agents.