Bittensor Drama! TAO down 15%! | E2274

About this episode

The episode discusses the recent drop in TAO's value following Covenant AI's departure from the Bittensor network, featuring insights from Gareth Howells and Ole Lehmann.

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Pilot - https:// pilot.com/TWIST Squarespace - https:// squarespace.com/TWIST Northwest Registered Agent - https:// northwestregisteredagent.com/TWIST Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist CrowdHealth - ⁠https://JoinCrowdHealth.com/twist⁠ Today’s show: TAO, the token associated with the Bittensor network, fell sharply last night after a major project declared it was taking its business elsewhere. Covenant AI had used Bittensor subnets 3, 39, and 89 before its abrupt and controversial decision to depart for other digital shores. Gareth Howells, a co-founder of Vidaio (Bittensor Subnet 85), joined Jason and Alex to share the community perspective regarding Covenant’s decision to leave Bittensor, a choice that was especially bitter given that its recently-released Covenant-72B model trained using the network’s decentralized capabilities was hailed at the time as a demonstration of the crypto-AI hybrid’s potential. (Covenant’s Sam Dare was a recent guest on TWiST.) Howells walked us through Vidaio’s product (AI models for high-quality video work, like upscaling) Then it was time to bring new fan-favorite Ole Lehmann on. Ole took an Andrej Karpathy…

People in this episode

Host: Jason Calacanis

Guests: Gareth Howells, Ole Lehmann

Topics covered

• Bittensor
• Covenant AI
• crypto
• AI models
• blockchain
• decentralization

Keywords

• Bittensor
• Covenant AI
• TAO
• Gareth Howells
• Ole Lehmann
• crypto-AI
• decentralized capabilities

Sponsors

Pilot, Squarespace, Northwest Registered Agent, Plaud, CrowdHealth

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bittensor, Covenant AI, Vidaio

Products: Covenant-72B, OpenClaw, Claude Cowork

More episodes of This Week in Startups

• SpaceX IPO Day: What Wall St. and the media missed | E2300 · June 13, 2026 · 1h 20m
• Why the most expensive Seed deals are the cheapest | E2299 · June 10, 2026 · 1h 8m
• The AI Tutor That Makes Kids Actually Think | E2298 · June 8, 2026 · 1h 0m
• Anthropic wants to slow AI down and Bernie wants 50%: JCal Reacts | E2297 · June 6, 2026 · 1h 33m
• The project SpaceX's first employee raised $500M for · June 3, 2026 · 1h 2m
• This Startup Fused Human Brain Cells with Silicon Chips | E2295 · June 1, 2026 · 1h 6m