MONITOR INFRA

“The company realized it would wreak havoc. They ran their own vulnerability testing. They saw that it would allow offensive hacking and people to expose browsers and browser history, expose credit cards, you know, on the Internet. So, you know, what I like about this is they didn't need government to hold their hand on this.”

“Let's spend a hundred days using advanced AI to find and to fix and to harden these software vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them. Now what I think this represents, Jason, is a threshold that we're crossing. Mythos and Spud, which is going to be out from OpenAI any day now, represent the beginning of what I would call AGI models.”

“I think Anthropic has proven that it's very good at two things. One is product releases. The second is scaring people. And we've seen a pattern in their previous releases of, at the same time, they roll out a new model or new model card, something like that. They also roll out some study showing really the worst possible implication of where the technology could lead.”

“These are models with massive step function improvements and intelligence, and they're just too smart to be released immediately. You know, and by the way, there was nothing that said that every time you finish a model you gotta immediately release it GA. So they set up this idea of sandboxing, building defensive alliances, in order to move away from that regime.”

“It shows you can trust the industry and market forces in coordination with the government. They were talking to the government about this, but they're not relying on some top down regulation in order to do this. They laid out a blueprint that seems to me very pragmatic that now that we're at this threshold, we're gonna sandbox these things.”

“The company realized it would wreak havoc. They ran their own vulnerability testing. They saw that it would allow offensive hacking and people to expose browsers and browser history, expose credit cards, you know, on the Internet. So, you know, what I like about this is they didn't need government to hold their hand on this.”

“Let's spend a hundred days using advanced AI to find and to fix and to harden these software vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them. Now what I think this represents, Jason, is a threshold that we're crossing. Mythos and Spud, which is going to be out from OpenAI any day now, represent the beginning of what I would call AGI models.”

“I think Anthropic has proven that it's very good at two things. One is product releases. The second is scaring people. And we've seen a pattern in their previous releases of, at the same time, they roll out a new model or new model card, something like that. They also roll out some study showing really the worst possible implication of where the technology could lead.”

“These are models with massive step function improvements and intelligence, and they're just too smart to be released immediately. You know, and by the way, there was nothing that said that every time you finish a model you gotta immediately release it GA. So they set up this idea of sandboxing, building defensive alliances, in order to move away from that regime.”

“It shows you can trust the industry and market forces in coordination with the government. They were talking to the government about this, but they're not relying on some top down regulation in order to do this. They laid out a blueprint that seems to me very pragmatic that now that we're at this threshold, we're gonna sandbox these things.”

“The company realized it would wreak havoc. They ran their own vulnerability testing. They saw that it would allow offensive hacking and people to expose browsers and browser history, expose credit cards, you know, on the Internet. So, you know, what I like about this is they didn't need government to hold their hand on this.”

“Let's spend a hundred days using advanced AI to find and to fix and to harden these software vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them. Now what I think this represents, Jason, is a threshold that we're crossing. Mythos and Spud, which is going to be out from OpenAI any day now, represent the beginning of what I would call AGI models.”

“I think Anthropic has proven that it's very good at two things. One is product releases. The second is scaring people. And we've seen a pattern in their previous releases of, at the same time, they roll out a new model or new model card, something like that. They also roll out some study showing really the worst possible implication of where the technology could lead.”

“These are models with massive step function improvements and intelligence, and they're just too smart to be released immediately. You know, and by the way, there was nothing that said that every time you finish a model you gotta immediately release it GA. So they set up this idea of sandboxing, building defensive alliances, in order to move away from that regime.”

“It shows you can trust the industry and market forces in coordination with the government. They were talking to the government about this, but they're not relying on some top down regulation in order to do this. They laid out a blueprint that seems to me very pragmatic that now that we're at this threshold, we're gonna sandbox these things.”

“The company realized it would wreak havoc. They ran their own vulnerability testing. They saw that it would allow offensive hacking and people to expose browsers and browser history, expose credit cards, you know, on the Internet. So, you know, what I like about this is they didn't need government to hold their hand on this.”

“Let's spend a hundred days using advanced AI to find and to fix and to harden these software vulnerabilities before hackers exploit them. Now what I think this represents, Jason, is a threshold that we're crossing. Mythos and Spud, which is going to be out from OpenAI any day now, represent the beginning of what I would call AGI models.”

“I think Anthropic has proven that it's very good at two things. One is product releases. The second is scaring people. And we've seen a pattern in their previous releases of, at the same time, they roll out a new model or new model card, something like that. They also roll out some study showing really the worst possible implication of where the technology could lead.”

“These are models with massive step function improvements and intelligence, and they're just too smart to be released immediately. You know, and by the way, there was nothing that said that every time you finish a model you gotta immediately release it GA. So they set up this idea of sandboxing, building defensive alliances, in order to move away from that regime.”

“It shows you can trust the industry and market forces in coordination with the government. They were talking to the government about this, but they're not relying on some top down regulation in order to do this. They laid out a blueprint that seems to me very pragmatic that now that we're at this threshold, we're gonna sandbox these things.”

“They are stating that the AI-fueled stock market bubble is going to burst starting right now in 2026. Their thesis is that starting in 2026, those spectacular gains are going to unwind precipitously because rising interest rates and a higher, stickier inflation rate will essentially act as gravity on these sky-high equity valuations.”

“When you buy a tech stock at a massive premium, you're basically buying the promise of huge profits 10 or 15 years in the future. But if interest rates are high today, the mathematical value of those future profits shrinks drastically. When Capital Economics says inflation is sticky, they are saying the easy money era is over, which means the justification for these astronomical tech valuations evaporates.”

“Bridgewater Associates has executed a massive portfolio pivot that completely contradicts the mainstream narrative. We are talking about cutting their holdings in Meta by over 46 percent, alphabet position by 40 percent, and they even cut Microsoft by 10 percent. These are the companies that completely defined the 2024 and 2025 bull run.”

“The core issue they are pointing to is the infrastructure cost. If the cost of building out the servers, the power grids and the massive data centers for AI outpaces the actual dollars and cents it generates in revenue, the math simply stops working. It becomes a black hole for capital.”

“Private equity firms are lending billions of dollars to AI start-ups entirely outside the purview of traditional banking regulators. If one major AI start-up defaults on that private debt because their models don't generate the promised revenue, the contagion in that unregulated debt market could be incredibly rapid and entirely opaque until it is far too late.”

“But I think the overall takeaway for me is just tough. Still some cool ideas and cool people around the place spiking up. But I think we're going to look back on this year. 2026 is similar to 2018, when you had to be a very true believer, half lost your marbles to believe this is going to absolutely come back in a big way, because right now, it feels like it's not going to happen.”

“One is the ruled asset side. It's clear that assets are coming on chain, and Ethereum is still the main venue for that. So it seems like this conference outside of vaults, the next topic is really RWA is coming on chain, and what assets those are, and how those are being used financially, et cetera.”

“I would guess that over the course of the next year or so, there's a lot of folks either closing up shop or potentially M&A, that kind of aqua hire type situations and consolidation, especially in the infraspace. I will say, I do think there's the opportunity for a couple valuable infrabusinesses to get built, if you can vertically integrate and consolidate.”

“There's a lot of curators around the place here, and it's very clear that vault management as an industry is going to continue growing over time. And I think right now you're seeing most of that vault management being done on Ethereum. And so as capital keeps flowing into Ethereum, of course, as all the liquidity, I think that Ethereum will capture probably the most amount of value there.”

“But what I do think is quite interesting is that European funds seem to be raising still, which I think is interesting. So like, maybe if the talent's not here yet, it might come back because the capital is still here. So yeah, overall, I think it's been a really great conference and formative conference.”

“They are stating that the AI-fueled stock market bubble is going to burst starting right now in 2026. Their thesis is that starting in 2026, those spectacular gains are going to unwind precipitously because rising interest rates and a higher, stickier inflation rate will essentially act as gravity on these sky-high equity valuations.”

“When you buy a tech stock at a massive premium, you're basically buying the promise of huge profits 10 or 15 years in the future. But if interest rates are high today, the mathematical value of those future profits shrinks drastically. When Capital Economics says inflation is sticky, they are saying the easy money era is over, which means the justification for these astronomical tech valuations evaporates.”

“Bridgewater Associates has executed a massive portfolio pivot that completely contradicts the mainstream narrative. We are talking about cutting their holdings in Meta by over 46 percent, alphabet position by 40 percent, and they even cut Microsoft by 10 percent. These are the companies that completely defined the 2024 and 2025 bull run.”

“The core issue they are pointing to is the infrastructure cost. If the cost of building out the servers, the power grids and the massive data centers for AI outpaces the actual dollars and cents it generates in revenue, the math simply stops working. It becomes a black hole for capital.”

“Private equity firms are lending billions of dollars to AI start-ups entirely outside the purview of traditional banking regulators. If one major AI start-up defaults on that private debt because their models don't generate the promised revenue, the contagion in that unregulated debt market could be incredibly rapid and entirely opaque until it is far too late.”

“I wanted to feed Mundy and Tara close together. And so I fed Tara over here. She picked up her food and brought it right over to the fence line here so she could be eating with Mundy. So you tell me what that means. I think that is really good.”

“The dominant political story of the year has been the 270-day-long speakership of Representative Kevin McCarthy, whose slim majority in the House of Representatives has enabled a far-right rebellion to exert more weight over the lower chamber. The battle between the rebellious Freedom Caucus and McCarthy has been at the heart of an averted debt ceiling crisis and the annual budget debate nearly devolving into a government shutdown.”

“Additionally, the latter half of the year saw many large mergers and acquisitions, some of the largest announcements being in oil and gas with ExxonMobil's purchase of Pioneer Natural Resources for nearly $60 billion and Chevron's acquisition of Hess Corporation for $50 billion, both in October and pending regulatory approval prior to closure.”

“The rise of artificial intelligence and large language models dominated not only the economy but has also been at the root of a Hollywood double strike conducted by Writers Guild of America and a SAG APTRA strike, these were part of a larger phenomenon of labor strikes across the country, in which such large diverse groups, such as Teamsters and Auto Workers won new contracts.”

“A 2023 FAA system outage, for the first time since 9-11, the Federal Aviation Administration issues a nationwide ground stop following the failure of the FAA's NOTAM system. Attorney General Merrick Garland appoints Robert Herr to investigate mishandling of classified documents by President Biden.”

“Bittensor TAO just shipped a model that competes the outputs of centralized labs. That crosses the line from white paper to infrastructure, and this is where the rubber meets the road, and a lot of these AI adjacent projects are going to be left behind, and the AI direct projects are going to rise to the top.”

“This is a decentralized computer vision platform that lets miners analyze football video footage—actually, soccer—in real time, tracking the players, the ball, and the game events using object detection and key point models. Validators score the accuracy of these annotations, rewarding the best miners with TAO, so that it can build fast, cheap, and scalable sports intelligence that anyone can use.”

“It's a creator marketing platform in Bittensor, TAO, where brands publish campaign briefs, and miners, known as YouTube influencers or content creators, produce videos and posts that fulfill the briefs. These validators use platform APIs to verify actual engagement, views and performance, and then reward the best performing creators with TAO token so that the network can continue to build kind of a transparent middleman marketplace.”

“Ridges AI is a marketplace on Bittensor for autonomous software engineering agents. This is where miners run AI coders in Python that solve real coding tasks, generate features, fix bugs and beat benchmarks like the SWE bench. The validators score the agents on their accuracy, their speed and their actual usefulness in the real world to reward the top performers.”

“It's a probability in my mind that these AI agents are going to want to be paid in crypto and banks cannot onboard AI agents as customers. AI agents cannot transact in a bank; they're only able to use crypto wallets. This leaves a massive opportunity for crypto, and this might be the big explosion of use case that we were all wondering how it would look like.”

“They are stating that the AI-fueled stock market bubble is going to burst starting right now in 2026. Their thesis is that starting in 2026, those spectacular gains are going to unwind precipitously because rising interest rates and a higher, stickier inflation rate will essentially act as gravity on these sky-high equity valuations.”

“When you buy a tech stock at a massive premium, you're basically buying the promise of huge profits 10 or 15 years in the future. But if interest rates are high today, the mathematical value of those future profits shrinks drastically. When Capital Economics says inflation is sticky, they are saying the easy money era is over, which means the justification for these astronomical tech valuations evaporates.”

“Bridgewater Associates has executed a massive portfolio pivot that completely contradicts the mainstream narrative. We are talking about cutting their holdings in Meta by over 46 percent, alphabet position by 40 percent, and they even cut Microsoft by 10 percent. These are the companies that completely defined the 2024 and 2025 bull run.”

“The core issue they are pointing to is the infrastructure cost. If the cost of building out the servers, the power grids and the massive data centers for AI outpaces the actual dollars and cents it generates in revenue, the math simply stops working. It becomes a black hole for capital.”

“Private equity firms are lending billions of dollars to AI start-ups entirely outside the purview of traditional banking regulators. If one major AI start-up defaults on that private debt because their models don't generate the promised revenue, the contagion in that unregulated debt market could be incredibly rapid and entirely opaque until it is far too late.”

“They are stating that the AI-fueled stock market bubble is going to burst starting right now in 2026. Their thesis is that starting in 2026, those spectacular gains are going to unwind precipitously because rising interest rates and a higher, stickier inflation rate will essentially act as gravity on these sky-high equity valuations.”

“When you buy a tech stock at a massive premium, you're basically buying the promise of huge profits 10 or 15 years in the future. But if interest rates are high today, the mathematical value of those future profits shrinks drastically. When Capital Economics says inflation is sticky, they are saying the easy money era is over, which means the justification for these astronomical tech valuations evaporates.”

“Bridgewater Associates has executed a massive portfolio pivot that completely contradicts the mainstream narrative. We are talking about cutting their holdings in Meta by over 46 percent, alphabet position by 40 percent, and they even cut Microsoft by 10 percent. These are the companies that completely defined the 2024 and 2025 bull run.”

“The core issue they are pointing to is the infrastructure cost. If the cost of building out the servers, the power grids and the massive data centers for AI outpaces the actual dollars and cents it generates in revenue, the math simply stops working. It becomes a black hole for capital.”

“Private equity firms are lending billions of dollars to AI start-ups entirely outside the purview of traditional banking regulators. If one major AI start-up defaults on that private debt because their models don't generate the promised revenue, the contagion in that unregulated debt market could be incredibly rapid and entirely opaque until it is far too late.”

“I wanted to feed Mundy and Tara close together. And so I fed Tara over here. She picked up her food and brought it right over to the fence line here so she could be eating with Mundy. So you tell me what that means. I think that is really good.”

“The dominant political story of the year has been the 270-day-long speakership of Representative Kevin McCarthy, whose slim majority in the House of Representatives has enabled a far-right rebellion to exert more weight over the lower chamber. The battle between the rebellious Freedom Caucus and McCarthy has been at the heart of an averted debt ceiling crisis and the annual budget debate nearly devolving into a government shutdown.”

“Additionally, the latter half of the year saw many large mergers and acquisitions, some of the largest announcements being in oil and gas with ExxonMobil's purchase of Pioneer Natural Resources for nearly $60 billion and Chevron's acquisition of Hess Corporation for $50 billion, both in October and pending regulatory approval prior to closure.”

“The rise of artificial intelligence and large language models dominated not only the economy but has also been at the root of a Hollywood double strike conducted by Writers Guild of America and a SAG APTRA strike, these were part of a larger phenomenon of labor strikes across the country, in which such large diverse groups, such as Teamsters and Auto Workers won new contracts.”

“A 2023 FAA system outage, for the first time since 9-11, the Federal Aviation Administration issues a nationwide ground stop following the failure of the FAA's NOTAM system. Attorney General Merrick Garland appoints Robert Herr to investigate mishandling of classified documents by President Biden.”

“President Trump said on Truth Social that dozens of planes took part in the operation to save the airmen after his F-15 fighter jet was hit over western Iran on Friday. The plane's pilot was quickly rescued, but the weapons officer, an Air Force colonel, had to go into hiding. Trump wrote, quote, This brave warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran. US rescue aircraft came under fire, but managed to reach the airmen and fly them out of the country.”

“On this Easter Sunday, President Trump went on Truth Social this morning to threaten Iran. In a profanity-laden post, he said Tuesday will be Power Plant Day and Bridge Day, repeating his threat to strike Iran's critical infrastructure if Iran doesn't reopen the Strait of Hormuz by his Monday deadline. Trump ended the post with, praise be to Allah.”

“Easter services are mixed with funerals as Israel bombs Lebanon's south and demolishes homes there. In the Christian village of Dibil, resident Maroun Yassif tells NPR, They're under siege and being shelled. United Nations peacekeepers say they've lodged a formal protest after Israeli soldiers destroyed security cameras outside a UN base in southern Lebanon. Three UN peacekeepers were killed last month and several have been wounded.”

“Egypt said today that its foreign minister, Badr Abdel-Ati, had had phone conversations with his regional counterparts, as well as US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Iran's foreign minister Abbas Arakchi to discuss proposals to de-escalate the Iran war. The phone conversations follow Egypt's participation last weekend in talks with Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia on the Iran conflict, which has also triggered a rise in global fuel costs.”

“Hollywood studios and screenwriters reached an agreement yesterday on a new contract. It's for four years, a year longer than usual. The precise terms have not been disclosed. The Writers Guild issued a statement that the contract protects health care gains that were reached in 2023. The current contract expires June 30th. The swift resolution of negotiations comes in stark contrast to the last round, when Hollywood writers went on strike for months.”

“But I think the overall takeaway for me is just tough. Still some cool ideas and cool people around the place spiking up. But I think we're going to look back on this year. 2026 is similar to 2018, when you had to be a very true believer, half lost your marbles to believe this is going to absolutely come back in a big way, because right now, it feels like it's not going to happen.”

“One is the ruled asset side. It's clear that assets are coming on chain, and Ethereum is still the main venue for that. So it seems like this conference outside of vaults, the next topic is really RWA is coming on chain, and what assets those are, and how those are being used financially, et cetera.”

“I would guess that over the course of the next year or so, there's a lot of folks either closing up shop or potentially M&A, that kind of aqua hire type situations and consolidation, especially in the infraspace. I will say, I do think there's the opportunity for a couple valuable infrabusinesses to get built, if you can vertically integrate and consolidate.”

“There's a lot of curators around the place here, and it's very clear that vault management as an industry is going to continue growing over time. And I think right now you're seeing most of that vault management being done on Ethereum. And so as capital keeps flowing into Ethereum, of course, as all the liquidity, I think that Ethereum will capture probably the most amount of value there.”

“But what I do think is quite interesting is that European funds seem to be raising still, which I think is interesting. So like, maybe if the talent's not here yet, it might come back because the capital is still here. So yeah, overall, I think it's been a really great conference and formative conference.”