🦍 State of the Market..

The overall Crypto AI market has risen 8.6% from $21B to $23.3B this week.

The AI agents subcategory (Coingecko) saw an impressive 20% jump, driven largely by gains in FET and AGIX.

A big part of the buzz comes from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI), with news that CUDOS may soon join. 

This news has pushed up token prices for ASI, AGIX, and OCEAN by at least 23%, while CUDOS has dropped about 10% since last week. It seems ASI is quickly becoming an AI conglomerate, absorbing any AI-related project it needs

 📊 Chart of the Week

Hermes 3 Nears 1B Tokens Processed Daily

Recent activity on Nous Research’s flagship Hermes 3 405B model has reached almost 1B tokens processed daily on OpenRouter. This suggests that the demand for open-source models is significant and steadily growing.

They’ve shown significant performance in alignment with the user, multi-turn conversations, RAG, and other features.

FYI: We released a report on Nous Research earlier this week. Fresh from the oven.

🍓 Open AI Launches a Strawberry

OpenAI just released its latest model, o1 (codename: Strawberry), and the biggest shift? It takes its time to think.

This makes it particularly suited for more complex, planning-heavy tasks—think solving crossword puzzles or tackling problems that require deep reasoning, like a PhD student in physics or biology might.

You’ll notice it’s slower, taking more time to generate responses. We’re seeing the concept of inference-time scaling finally being put into production.

Inference-time scaling is the new buzzword in AI.

The idea is to improve AI performance by increasing the compute during inference rather than constantly training larger and larger models.

If this picks up — expect the demand for GPUs to ramp up massively soon.

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Project Updates

• PIN AI raises $10M in pre seed funding to launch the world’s first open platform for personal AI. Notable investors like a16z, Hack VC, and angels like Illia of NEAR participated

• Flock.io, the decentralised ML data network and recipient of the Ethereum Foundation Research Grant, releases their whitepaper

• Peaq Network announces that they are launching this month

• Mentals AI is garnering attention with their markdown AI agents

• Hyperbolic partners with Black Forest Labs to bring FLUX text-to-image to Hyperbolic’s AI cloud

• Parallel TCG’s cofounder Kalos summarizes all of the recent updates

• Topology Ventures, an AI native venture firm, is hiring a technical investor (great opportunity imho)

Incentives / Rewards Programs

• Almanak, a project building AI agents for DeFi, launches their alpha testing and points program

• Ora Protocol’s points program went live on September 11th. They also released Tora, a node program that anyone can run to secure Ora network and earn points

• Sapien, a data labelling platform, is running an incentivized alpha where users can earn points

• Privasea allocates 10% of tokens for their airdrop; caveat is that you have to download their mobile app and verify yourself

Arweave / AO

• Arweave / AO weekly highlights summarized by Kyle_13

• AO crosses $50M in DAI deposits

• Meka City, built on Reality Protocol from AO, goes live. Meka City is an NFT gated game built on AO

Bittensor

• Miner’s Union receives 113K TAO ($29.4M) from the Bittensor foundation for validation on various subnets

• Bittensor releases Child Hotkeys, creating more decentralization and the ability to delegate from one hotkey to many

• Omega Labs, subnet 24 on Bittensor, is processing Any-to-Any for text, audio, and video in the same model. Their new Focus App incentives users to contribute for better training

• Ventura Labs writes about Bittensor Subnet 38, specially built for distributed training

• Fiber, a newly released protocol, is purpose-built to shortcut the process of building Bittensor subnets

• Macrocosmos releases a full testnet for OpenMM, a key step towards releasing their flagship TaoFold

🌴 A Reflection on Reflection 70B

On September 6th, Matt Shumer, CEO of Otherside AI, unveiled Reflection 70B, claiming it was competitive with top closed-source models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and even outperformed them on several benchmarks.

The secret behind this impressive performance was “Reflection tuning,” a technique that allows LLMs to iterate over their responses and correct mistakes before delivering them to the user.

Excitement was high—until some users began questioning its legitimacy. Skepticism grew over its near-perfect GSM8K score (99%!) and suspicions that the private API Shumer provider might just be a wrapper for Claude 3.5.

Speculation surfaced that Shumer was using the hype around Reflection 70B to boost the value of his investments.

The backlash from the community was swift, leading to Reflection 70B being removed from OpenRouter and Shumer issuing an apology.

Some learning points:

• Don’t believe everything you see!

• Simple “hacks” like Reflection turning will probably not lead to outsized performance gains.

This whole episode highlights the increasing demand for accountability and transparency in AI. Verifiable inference FTW.

🔥 On X..

Apple Intelligence for iPhone 16. Will you make the switch?

Nillion Cofounder on Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Web 3

Alex Wacy writes about Compute Labs

LLMs will always hallucinate.

Brendan Farmer on when compute needs to be verified

Jasper Zhang of Hyperbolic breaks down AI Benchmarks - GSM8K

Ben Fielding on Human and Machine knowledge curation