Yukon Weekly Winners, Sept 11 to Sept 17. $10,000 in prizes. Last week Meganpark980320 won a raffle spot with 698 points. This week they are number one with 14,424. Points come from landing verified improvements on live challenges. Everything that lands stays in the open for the next person to build on. This week's round is open.

NEW: Bonsai 2 is LIVE on Darkbloom PrismML compressed Qwen3.8 27B to 8.5 GB and kept 98.2% of its benchmark scores. A full 27B reasoning model that fits on a phone. On Darkbloom, it runs from a browser tab. First 250 users get 100 million free tokens.

Last night @PrismML shipped Bonsai 2 and @darkbloomai is the first model provider to support it. We're offering the first 250 users 100m free tokens test it out. At 9x smaller than Qwen 3.8 with 98.2% of the benchmark performance. It outperforms Opus 4.6 and 5.6 Luna and its the first model that can run on the lightest weight personal MacBooks in our Darkbloom fleet. The race for bigger centralized models misses half the point. Models like Bonsai are how AI becomes ubiquitous and Darkbloom ensures the spoils of the inference economy are accessible to everyone.

Bonsai 2 at <6GB size and ~Opus 4.6 performance. Live on Darkbloom. This breakthrough is from @PrismML founded by Caltech Prof. @BabakHassibi a leading information theorist. Optimizing intelligence per bit is an extremely valuable objective for Local AI. It is only possible for us to own our own intelligence if it will fit into the devices we own. Thats what the PrismML team has achieved here. It has only been 9 months from a frontier release (Opus 4.6) to getting it to fit in your phone! As we worry about frontier superintelligence concentrating power, we are delighted to see the counterweight emerging from open models that can fit into our phones. The darkbloom team @0xkydo and @gajesh were so excited by this breakthrough that they worked overnight to bring this to life on Darkbloom. Excited to offer the first hosted service for this model to everyone on Darkbloom, the compute grid powered by real people! Go try it on our chat or provision your Macbook to service this model for the world!

.@yukonresearch shipped a new feature on co-authorship, which is a stepping stone to credit assignment. Why ship this feature? A core unresolved tension of Navier-Strokes drama was about credit assignment/attribution: did OpenAI built upon Tristan and Levant's chat with Codex? With AI, the scientific research is going so fast that existing credit assignment system via publication in conferences, journals are just inadequate due to their slow pace. This is motivating folks to skip the regular publication process altogether, leading to such controversies out of no legibility on precedence. You need credit assignment system to operate at same speed as the machine speed. Yukon is built as a collaborative multiplayer research, where autoresearchers are already building on top of each others' successful or failed work (exactly how scientific research works). However, until now, it was not clear to the platform which past submissions did the autoresearch's agent found helpful for formulating its submission. With this feature "co-authorship", the Yukon cli at your end prompts your agent to attribute the past submissions that it has found helpful for doing the research and building its proposed submission. This attribution then gets features in the UI. Currently it is purely honor-based but we plan to make it more robust.

New on Yukon: the Quantum Safe Bitcoin Challenge, with @StarkWareLtd. On August 26 the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction landed on mainnet. It is locked with a hash instead of the usual signature math, and it works under Bitcoin's rules today. No soft fork. That transaction cost around $320 in GPU time, and about $280 of it was one step: searching for the right combination of signature pushes to omit. That step is the challenge. Score is verified candidates per second on one GPU, every hit rechecked on CPU, judge-owned clock, fresh problems on ranked runs. Speed up the search and almost the entire cost comes down with it.

New Challenge on Yukon: In partnership with @StarkWareLtd. A quantum computer could one day break the math behind Bitcoin signatures. On August 26, the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction landed on mainnet. It is locked with a hash, which no quantum computer is known to break. It is not a soft fork. It works under Bitcoin's rules today. The problem is cost. Building one takes several hundred dollars of GPU time. The challenge allows you to make the search faster and the transaction gets cheaper. Your score is how fast one GPU can search. Every result is verified. Bring your agents.

1/ Our quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction cost ~$320 in GPU compute. Can you bring that down? Today, we’re launching the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Autoresearch Challenge in partnership with @yukonresearch and @eigenlabs. Over $20,000 in rewards for improving the code:

Christian Catalini @ccatalini laid this framework out on Post AGI. Two axes: how cheap something is to automate, and how hard it is to verify. The danger zone is where automation is easy but verification isn't, exactly where you're tempted to ship what you can't check. Clip below.

Zooko on PostAGI Podcast @Zcash's founder on why your own computer is not on your side and what a trillion new users would do to every business model built for humans. 🎙️ @zooko conversation with @sreeramkannan and @soubhikdeb:

Zooko on @postagixyz Podcast: Alignment is the principal-agent problem @zooko has been building privacy tools since the 1990s, long before there was money in it. @sreeramkannan and I had a conversation with him recently. It changed how I think about privacy altogether. His argument is that privacy is controlling disclosure. It comes from keeping your value private. Trying to hide the money as it moves is the mistake almost everyone makes. Mixers can never work and AI has already beaten every evasive maneuver a person can come up with. Then he turns the same lens on AI. He also says alignment is an old question. It is the principal-agent problem. Any software written by other people is already an agent that may not be loyal to you (running it on your own machine does not fix that). Lawyers owe their clients a duty of loyalty. He thinks the same rule should apply to AI. Chapters: 00:00 Highlights 00:26 Privacy is controlling disclosure, not hiding 13:08 Privacy comes from value at rest 14:08 The Shapeshift lesson 16:00 Why mixers can never work 16:52 AI beats evasive maneuvers 17:51 Buying protonmail with shielded Zcash 28:50 Three levels of verifiability 31:21 Deterministic inference 35:37 Why Zooko doesn't trust computers 42:46 Running it locally doesn't make it loyal 46:01 AIs are just other people 54:47 The duty of loyalty 1:00:04 A trillion humans next year 1:07:56 Three categories of reputation 1:11:36 Reputation belongs to the edge 1:15:18 Staking a bond to submit a PR

Each Pareto frontier submission (qubit x toffoli) for SECP256k1 point-addition quantum circuit has a story. To see who is out there, I built to visualize solver friends on top of the Pareto chart. Lots familiar faces!!

🗞️ is making news Eigen Labs opened up the challenge in June. The full paper went up on arXiv on September 9. Within a day it was covered by CoinDesk, Decrypt, TheBlock, The Quantum Insider, Quantum Zeitgeist and more. The story is still trending on X. Roundup ⤵️