🦍 State of the Market..

What a rollercoaster!

The Crypto AI market had a rough week, dropping 21.2% to $24.8B, down from $31.5B last week. It was one of the worst performers, especially compared to DeFi (-8.7%) and Memes (-8%).

News of escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, coupled with the looming election season, has the market on edge.

Surprisingly, TAO has shown remarkable strength. Its price remains at $559, a 4% rise from last week. The Bittensor community has strong hands, clearly. 🤚🤚

The rest of the Crypto AI market stumbled, with tokens like NEAR, NMT, and ASI all suffering 15% drops.

One token that has received a lot of attention is Morphware’s token XMW.

It’s skyrocketed 158% in the last seven days, showing how quickly low liquidity tokens can experience sharp gains. Morphware is an AI project built as a Layer 3 on Starknet, offering compute at lower prices thanks to access to Paraguay’s renewable energy. 

There’s been a wave of influencer shills on X, likely driving the recent pump. After diving into the documentation, we didn’t find much to get excited about yet—so tread carefully if you’re trading it!

 📊 Chart of the Week

AI Is Taking Over Our Jobs

In August, researchers from NYU dropped a fascinating study that digs into the ripple effects of generative AI on the freelance market, specifically using data from UpWork, a major freelancing platform.

The findings paint a clear picture: freelancers are feeling the squeeze.

According to the study, freelancers have seen a 2% dip in the number of monthly jobs (Panel A) and a 5% drop in monthly revenue (Panel B) over the past year. These are real financial pain points if you’re making your living through freelance work.

As AI continues to improve, everyone is going to feel the impact, and it’s not just the creatives.

The pace of change will only accelerate.

🌴 23andMe….Or 23andWe?

Over the past week, many people have been discussing 23andMe’s decline and what it means for 15 million users’ genetic data. Most disconcerting is that those 15 million users have no control over what happens to their data next.

Rumours have swirled about various SPACs being spun up to acquire the company. But the latest news is that CEO Anne Wojcicki plans to take the company private and is not considering third-party offers.

How about setting up a Bittensor subnet to train AI on this data?

This week, a Data DAO called 23andWe launched on Vana, offering users a chance to upload their 23andMe data files in exchange for tokens. These tokens give users governance rights over how their data is used.

The potential for aggregating healthcare data directly from consumers is massive, but there’s a huge friction point: personal health data is notoriously difficult to access. Just try requesting your old X-ray from a hospital.

If a team can crack the code—whether through engineering or clever incentives—the opportunity in healthcare data is staggering.

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Fundraising

• Mind Network secures $10 million in Pre-A funding to develop FHE layer for AI and PoS Networks

Project Updates

• Talus introduces Nexus, an onchain framework for building and managing AI Agents

• Grass explains Live Context Retrieval (LCR) and its integration into language model training

• Hyperspace crosses 4000+ connected nodes, becoming a top global P2P network for AI

• Nous Research shares clips from the recent NousCon event featuring speakers from Haize Labs, Hugging Face, Arcee AI and .txt AI

• Prime Intellect reports ~4.4x monthly growth as more AI developers and startups turn to Prime Intellect for compute resources

• 0G labs pivots to build a decentralised AI operating system

• Spectral Labs showcases creating a copytrading agent to track one of the most profitable addresses on BRETT

• Theoriq teases how users can participate in their testnet

• Panthalia announces a verification layer for low-cost P2P compute scaling to large ML models

• AO users claim 750 relics, which are part of a limited AO NFT collection. Collect all 5 relics to unlock your own Omega Dumdum NFT

Incentives / Rewards Programs

• Spheron Network introduces Fizz Node, offering FN point rewards for providing compute on their platform

Bittensor

• Bittensor TAO allocation in Grayscale AI Fund increases from 2.6% to 27.6%

• BitMind AI releases offline DeepFake Detection Benchmark with CAMO framework

• Highlights of the Bittensor x Google event from the Dippy team

Hyperbolic

• Hyperbolic’s inference service reaches over 1 billion LLM tokens daily across 22 AI models

• Hyperbolic’s deep dive on their product and features

🧠 Web2 AI Corner

Major AI developments this week!

• Liquid, a spin-off from MIT, has released its first series of foundational models built on a novel non-transformer architecture. This new architecture significantly outperforms transformer-based models like Llama 3.2 for the first time. It shows how much scope for improvement there is on the architecture side.

• OpenAI releases Canvas, a fresh interface for GPT, along with new tools like vision fine-tuning and a real-time API for speech-to-speech applications.

• NVIDIA chip-maker competitor Cerebras files for an IPO

🔥 On X..

The rise of AI voice agents

Canvas is trained on fully-synthetic data

Lars on AI agents being “fake”

a16z’s podcast on decentralised AI featuring Nous Research

DMD reviews the yield calculations on Wayfinder’s PROMPT token

Menlo Ventures discusses how AI agents are driving the next wave of enterprise automation