Designing a Next-Gen Planetary-Scale Network to Create a Global and Scalable AI-Driven Community, with Ivan Nikitin @ Fortytwo (Audio)

Ivan co-founded Fortytwo, a planetary-scale intelligence network designed for next-generation AI applications and services. Fortytwo connects nodes running on consumer hardware with small AI models that collectively can outperform the reasoning capabilities of frontier AI (e.g.,centralized large models by OpenAI and Anthropic), creating a permissionless, scalable layer of community-driven intelligence free from intermediaries.

Ivan graduated from DePaul University and, early in his career, co-founded Temporal Games, where he served as CEO, focusing on AI projects in games and entertainment. He led the creation of autonomous, self-learning AI agents using Genetic Algorithms and Reinforcement Learning, which outperformed humans in classic games. In 2018, he developed a Conversational AI service leveraging some of the earliest LLMs to enhance game character interactivity. In 2023, he collaborated with NEOM to develop a state-of-the-art generative 3D graphics model and the industry's first LLM capable of spatial reasoning. His more recent workincludes research on Animated Gaussian Splatting for capturing and reconstructing volumetric video content, followed by ongoing efforts in AI decentralization, which led to the research on swarm inference and the creation of the Fortytwo network.