Svmuu News Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves has issued a statement regarding the Covenant AI incident, expressing that he was "deeply shaken" by the events of the past few days. He accused Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare of causing severe harm to the protocol and its community through his actions, betraying the trust of investors and users, and failing everyone. He also apologized to users who suffered losses due to the incident.
Steeves stated that Bittensor was designed from the outset to counter human greed and selfishness, aiming to promote AI ownership by all participants through a permissionless mechanism. He emphasized that while this incident exposed vulnerabilities in the system, it will also drive the protocol and community to further enhance their resilience to risks.
Regarding future directions, Steeves proposed advancing a "Locked Stake" mechanism, introducing a dimension of commitment based on "time + staking" at the protocol layer. This aims to improve transparency and investor protection, reducing similar risks. He noted that this proposal was originally co-designed with Samuel Dare's involvement.
Furthermore, he stated that development related to subnets 3, 39, and 81 will continue to be driven by the community, with the overall functionality and vision remaining unchanged. Steeves emphasized that Bittensor remains one of the most decentralized AI protocols currently available and will continue to advance the development of open AI. Plans include moving towards training larger-scale models, with a future goal of training a 1 trillion parameter model.