Supercycle

AI should be a public good, not something gatekept by a handful of megacorps We had Eric Yang, co-founder of Gradient Network, on the pod this week to talk through exactly that. Gradient's "Open Intelligence Stack" includes: i) Parallax for distributed model serving ii) Echo for decentralized reinforcement learning The whole thesis is that anyone should be able to run large models on consumer hardware (yes, including your Mac Minis + OpenClaws) Eric breaks down their $10M seed round led by Pantera, Multicoin, and HSG; where he sees the industry heading; and why post-training is going to be the dominant force in enterprise. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:15 AI market is booming 02:29 Local compute is a hot topic 03:02 Parallax Inference Engine 04:34 Intelligence as a public good 05:46 AI models will become a commodity 07:32 Bottlenecks in AI models accessibility 09:34 Smaller AI models are catching up 11:01 How Gradient's Infrastructure Enables Model Development 12:15 Model post-training 14:24 How does reinforcement learning work? 17:35 AI going rogue 19:20 Gradient's token 23:02 AI entrepreneurs that Eric admires 26:11 Use cases on chain for AI 31:34 The trade-offs of coming to crypto 35:09 How low-spec GPUs will work on Gradient Ecosystem 38:08 Post-training will be the dominating force for enterprise 38:43 Open source models are way cheaper 41:39 Eric's founding story 49:07 Empowering researchers globally 53:37 Why did Multicoin Capital and Pantera Capital invested in Gradient 55:08 One-click deploy agent 58:16 Gradient in 3 years