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Welcome to the 23rd edition of the TAO Times, where we share weekly updates on all of the most important events occurring within the Bittensor ecosystem!

For validators, subnet owners, miners, token holders, & community members.

Here is what happened during the week of January 19th ↘️

TAO Stats

Highlights of the Week

🔥 Const announced that dTAO is entering its final stages of testing and approvals before the planned upgrade launch date of February 10th-14th, with the process beginning next week through the release of the revised BIT001 paper, followed by a senate vote.

🔥 In this week's Novelty Search, the BitMind team presented their AI-generated content detection system that claims to outperform existing open-source solutions by 20%, achieving 91% accuracy through their network of competing miners and validators. The team discussed their technical architecture, anti-gaming measures through sophisticated data augmentation, and their partnership with Eidon to create an expanding dataset of real-world content, while highlighting their vision to become the authoritative solution for distinguishing between real and AI-generated content across multiple modalities.

🔥 Macrocosmos SN9 announced successful implementation of dataset mixing for their 14B model training competitions, demonstrating that mixed-dataset models (combining 85% FineWeb Edu2 with 15% code and science data) consistently outperformed non-mixed models across key benchmarks like MMLU, AGIEval, ARC Challenge, and GSM8K-CoT. The results show their mixed-dataset models matching or exceeding some open-source competitors like DeepSeek V2-Lite, suggesting that this approach could help SN9 achieve their goal of competing with leading AI labs' models through decentralized training.

🔥 Deepseek's LLMs are now accessible through two Bittensor subnet services: they are available for free without rate limits through Manifold's Targon API (Deepseek R1), and through Chutes' subnet which offers both the 671B parameter Deepseek R1 and V3 models alongside other LLMs like Llama 3.1 405B.

🔥 Collab Currency and DormDAO announced "Dorm Builders Season 01," a 10-week student hackathon in partnership with Opentensor, offering $10,000 grants to student teams building projects on the Bittensor network. The program invites students from top universities to develop EVM/subnet applications, propose new subnets, or create data visualizations, with final projects to be presented publicly and additional awards given at demo day.

🔥 Our third TAO Times Stream, which featured Arrash from Taoshi, James from Manifold Labs, and Seth from Crucible Labs, was an exciting conversation that covered the tailwinds for TAO, exploring the macro setup for open-source AI, and the different enterprise and development opportunities to be unlocked once dTAO is in production.

Ecosystem & Subnet Updates Below… ⬇️