This Bittensor Subnet Could Cut Drug Discovery Costs in HALF | E2267

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Mar 26, 2026

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Michaela Bazo, Metanova Labs co-founder, and Pedro Penna, technical lead in decentralized biotech, dive into Bittensor-powered drug discovery and the race to cut screening costs. Tom Bliers, BitCast Network co-founder, explores paying creators for watch time and branded videos. Max Septi, Score founder, shows how tiny vision AI models can make real-world deployment cheaper and faster.

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INSIGHT

Human Creators Still Beat AI Slop On BitCast

BitCast tries to suppress slop by tying rewards to engagement quality and brief accuracy, not upload volume.
Tom Bliers said early AI videos underperformed because viewers prefer people, and established creators protect their own reputations.

INSIGHT

Automation Unlocks The Long Tail Of Creators

Tom Bliers argued the creator economy is booming, but admin overhead pushes brands toward top creators and away from the long tail.
BitCast removes much of that coordination work, letting brands activate smaller trusted creators in many languages from one campaign.

ANECDOTE

BitCast Switched From Building To Scaling

BitCast says it shifted from building to scaling in 2026, reaching 50 creators with 2 million subscribers combined.
Tom Bliers said creator count is growing 40 to 50 percent monthly and watch time about 50 to 60 percent month over month.

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Today’s show:

What do drug discovery, the creator economy, and AI vision models have in common? In the case of Metanova, Bitcast, and Score, the answer is Bittensor. Yes, each of the three companies leverages the Bittensor network to get more work done, more quickly, in a completely decentralized fashion.

Metanova uses its subnet to run developer competitions to find exciting molecular candidates, parsing through a mountain of possibilities to pluck out the most promising for further investigation.

Bitcast uses its subnet to collect visibility demand from brands, which is served by video creators. The company is focused on the crypto niche to start, but will expand in time to other technology topics.

Score uses its subnet to generate highly performant, specialized vision models, which it then sells to customers through a platform (Manako).

In each case, the Bittensor’s economic engine unlocks global creativity to tackle tasks that were previously time-consuming, fragmented, or expensive to complete. Let’s see how quickly each company can scale and whether startups building on Bittensor can grow faster than their non-decentralized peers.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

2:19 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!

3:40 What is Bittensor?

7:22 Metanova Labs joins the show

9:28 Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist

17:16 How Metanova tackles the multi-billion dollar cost of drug discovery

20:48 Every.io - For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io

30:20 Bitcast joins the show

31:23 Luma AI - Luma builds accessible, professional-grade AI tools for creatives. Try Luma Agents for free at https://lumalabs.ai/twist

32:30 Mining crypto with YouTube

36:48 Why Bitcast is focused on the crypto space to start

39:11 How healthy is the creator economy?

47:26 When will the AI bubble collapse?

53:44 Score joins the show

54:42 How Score will make vision AI more accessible

57:16 VLMs v. LLMs

1:01:14 Demo of the Manako platform

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