It was always an AI company. Agoras was talking about AI before OpenAI released ChatGPT. It's just now AI is fashionable, but Tau is not the same kind of AI as LLMs. Tau is the other side of AI, the kind of AI that can reason, logic, etc. What is K/E ratio? That didn't exist when I posted in the past.
I looked it up, it seems to be a recent 2024 metric of some sort. I'll learn how that works.
But what did Tau Net achieve in all these years, apart from great concepts?
In a fraction of the time companies like OpenAI and Anthropic generated bio. of revenues (and even more losses but that´s another story).
Why don't you go and see for yourself? The testnet is running, the website explains: https://tau.net
Part of doing things right, takes longer. Other blockchains have been hacked for hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes more than once. I agree, it's taken a long time, but if you didn't have to hold anything during that time, you didn't have to pay the opportunity cost, so you'll get to use it soon. Myself, I'll admit I had to pay the 10 year opportunity cost, but we can't all win.
The website is nice but is there a single functioning use case where TAU made a difference? I have seen too many of those convincing project sites of tokens that are all gone by now.
It's testnet so I can't lie and claim it's making a financially measurable difference. But I can say the technology makes a difference. If you heard of "Constitutional AI", from researchers at Anthropic, or AI companies saying that term, it was actually us who invented it. Ohad in particular invented Tau, while myself and others invented or at least popularized the idea of a "smart Constitution" or AI Constitution. The difference between our idea of Constitutional AI and Anthropic's idea, is ours is a decided by the community. The opinion map, the million person discussion, all of this was about creating the rules to govern AI, and only Tau has the ability to do this.
Ohad Asor did the research which you can find in Theories and Application of Boolean Algebra, on the website. This research is what allows for Tau Language which has unique patented properties allowing for a formal constitution to be created. Unlike Anthropic's constitution which has to be enforced centralized, by a company, where you and I have no input on what it says, and Claude isn't guaranteed to follow it, with Tau, I can say that agents are mathematically guaranteed to follow the rules. This means Tau Network is the only network that exists where agents are governable. Tau Language is the only language that exists that allows for true Constitutional AI.
That's the breakthrough. Now we can look at some other stuff which isn't quite unique to Tau but is still valuable. Tau Language is correct by construction, any decentralized app is a formal specification, which means the sort of bugs where hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are lost, are mathematically impossible. Solana, Ethereum, these suffer vulnerabilities every few weeks, and now they are terrified of Mythos because of how many vulnerable smart contracts their network has.
Tau Net apps written in Tau Language will be invulnerable to the sort of hacks that commonly impact those other chains or even Hive. The only other chain I know of similar to this is Tezos, which also has never been hacked as far as I know. This is important because if we are going to build a decentralized economy, we don't win if people keep losing money from hacks, the whole DeFi loses legitimacy when this happens, and it's hurting everyone.
I hope that summarizes some of what Tau Net can do that no other technology can do. And I hope that shows you the value in the agentic era, where it's all about governing agents not just setting them to create slop and chaos.
Thanks for your insights.
It seems you are under the assumption that a decentralized governance is a value for the Tech elite (those who are behind the current LLMs). I am a hard core Hivians for over 9y, so this assumption is in my veins, too. But the sad reality is that centralization brings $$$, not decentralization (just look at the Hive price, but that has other reasons too). Maybe OpenAI and Co. do not want a decentralized and transparent, constitutional governance. Who in fact wants to follow decisions by the community (where 90% are dumb and easily manipulated)? Even in our socalled democracies, the elections are mostly fake and make people believe to have a choice (if they would really change things they are quickly revoked, like 2024 happened in Romania).
Sorry, I didn´t want to derail into politics, but great technological concepts and economic success are 2 completely different things.
It's not about what OpenAI and elites want. It's about what we need to survive a post AGI era. Elites don't care what happens to you or me. They don't care about our communities. They have the money, they have the compute, they have the power, or at least the illusion of power, and some seemingly don't believe in democracy.
But the people want AI they can control, under laws they can participate in creating, and to know the agents follow the laws. Even if you don't agree with your nations laws, it's not even mathematically provably that these agents run by companies will always follow the laws. Perhap they will follow some nations laws, but not your nations laws. Maybe they'll follow the internal constitution given to them by one person who wrote it all on their own.
And what about the rest of us? In the end, we have open source open weight models. We have decentralized networks. We have our own money. We have compute, at least for now. And while they have compute dominance, we still have communities.
And in the end, community is all this is about. Having AI, having technology, without the communities, is pointless. It's empty, and there is no purpose behind that. Kind of like what happens when AGI removes the jobs, without communities, there will be no purpose. So we need communities, just to know what to build next, just to give purpose to the builders.
And I know very well how crypto has lost it's money, to see it shift over to AI and to centralized AI companies at that. It's economically unsustainable. A paper came out proving mathematically it's unsustainable. On top of that, polls also are turning against Big AI, as increasingly more people aren't happy about losing their jobs to AI.
So as I see it, it's time to build up alternative infrastructure. I already was doing that with Tau, but that's what I think we must do. I do not think we can wait and hope for a savior from Big AI. And we have all the tools, all the tech, and the brain power.
OpenAI started in 2015 and released something around 2023. That's 8 years. Anthropic didn't exist, but sure they beat us to the punch. If you want to say other AI came faster, it's true.
But it's also not the same kind of AI. So it's not a threat. And OpenAI is not open or decentralized. You're relying on a centrally controlled AI, so when it comes to blockchain, Tau is one of the rare cases where we have something real. The only other alternatives are Bittensor and SingularityNET, and those work entirely different, less decentralized, different use cases.