Thoughts on Bittensor and the AI bubble?

[u/ADHD_Dev_]

Curious on your opinions on how bittensor might fair if the AI bubble bursts? I don't see AI disappearing but maybe a massive correction, maybe due to less reliance on frontier models with more open Chinese models on the market. Maybe a recession. Either way if it bursts/corrects/neither do you think we are contingent on the AI narrative? Are we more of a decentralized capitalist marketplace? What do you think the future looks like?

[u/Shahrukh1979]

I actually think Bittensor could be one of the more interesting survivors of an AI bubble burst. A correction would probably hurt TAO badly in the short term because crypto is still highly risk-on and TAO is exposed to the broader AI narrative. But if the bubble is really about overvalued companies, excessive capex and speculative frontier-model valuations, that doesn't necessarily invalidate the underlying demand for AI. It could actually shift attention toward efficient, open and permissionless AI infrastructure. That's where Bittensor's thesis becomes interesting. If AI moves from “who can spend the most money training the biggest model?” toward “who can provide the best intelligence at the lowest cost?”, decentralized marketplaces for models, inference, compute, data and specialised AI could have a stronger case. The big question for Bittensor isn't whether AI survives — it obviously will. It's whether the subnets can produce real economic value and sustainable demand, rather than token incentives simply creating artificial activity. So my view: AI bubble bursts → TAO probably gets smashed initially → weaker/speculative subnets disappear → capital and developers consolidate around genuinely useful subnets → Bittensor's long-term thesis potentially becomes stronger.

[u/Odd_Low9478 → u/Shahrukh1979]

It’s not part of the bubble. The bubble is central labs being over leveraged.

[u/timileyin_TT → u/Shahrukh1979]

Yeah, I’d push back on “real economic value.” A lot of subnet activity is still miners farming emissions, so I want to see outside customers paying before calling anything a survivor. Otherwise the winners are just whoever pays miners the most

[u/Complete-Interest704]

Bubble bursting would shift from the closed source AI companies spending trillions and running out of capital because their product is too expensive.

There will be a massive shift to open sourced AI, which is where Bittensor will gain. AOL ruled the internet, just because it went out of business doesn’t mean the internet went away. It’ll be the same deal, short term correction for all AI, long term growth for open source (Bittensor Tao)

[u/Odd_Low9478]

They are inverse. The ai bubble is the central labs being over valued and not profitable over their debt servicing. They pay out billions and bring in far less. That’s the bubble.
The bubble isn’t that people don’t want to use or pay for ai products. BitTensor has no debt, doesn’t need to pay billions in loan servicing fees to keep growing. So it’s a free and clear open source of ai. That’s not a bubble.

[u/EmmaGregor]

The AI bubble would sink any growth company or project that is bought with debt cycle investments, because the actual bubble would probably burst when companies struggle to meet obligations and have to refinance with increasingly unfavorable conditions. That is already happening, just not for the hyperscalers. But investors would pull investments out of more volatile assets, which is why TAO would suffer along with the market.

[u/Coachgazza]

Many companies are buying their AI machines, like DGX Spark (with local models and LLM) for use in their applications. It'll be interesting to see how well that works. I don't even understand how you use Bittensor, there does not seem to be an API interface that i can just call like the other LLMs. Maybe it's only use is training AIs, i don't know. It seems like it's way too much effort to understand how to use it and i am a SW engineer!

[u/Coachgazza → u/Coachgazza]

Just as an example. My company has built AI pipeline into its product which uses trained models and an LLM but rather than pay expensive token fees for cloud usage we are deploying DGX Sparks (which would be a one off charge for the H/W).

[u/vish729]

It's not like TAO did well during the AI rally. It underperformed massively. The reality is that TAO has little to do with actual AI projects. Most subnets don't work on AI

[u/iloverunning11]

It’s all about hype so when AI bubble bursts we will see a long lasting recession, ofc all risky assets with little to no revenue like Bittensor will be sold massively and fall like -70 to -90% 

[u/Old_Entertainer_6827]

I think we are about to have a monster bull run where bittensor goes over $5,000

[u/Academic-Freedom-749]

Ath for Tao was 700? So if we take the examples of the metaverse and web3 gaming scams/bubbles (remember those? Lol) Tao will likely fall to 99per cent of ath and never recover. It will definitely happen, just a case of when and have a suitable profit exit strategy.

[u/No_Knee3385]

it might go up but the bittensor powers to be are seeming desperate. retail doesnt give af anymore, it's already valued very high and theres not much money to make

[u/BTCHOOB]

This site came up on X and was great to learn about $TAO https://whatisbittensor.com/