With the amount of new subnets being added it can be hard to get up to date information across all subnets, so data may be slightly out of date from time to time
Bittensor Subnet 17 is empowering individuals to create worlds and games through simple descriptions, thereby democratizing 3D content creation, enabling anyone to develop virtual worlds, games, and AR/VR/XR experiences. This subnet utilizes a diverse array of existing Open Source 3D generative models, including Gaussian Splatting, Neural Radiance Fields, 3D Diffusion Models, and Point-Cloud approaches.
By integrating these models into decentralized incentive-based networks via Bittensor, the subnet aims to foster innovation. Its goal is to initiate a gaming revolution centered around AI-native games, utilizing the broader Bittensor ecosystem to enable real-time generation of assets, voice, and sound. This approach empowers creative individuals, even those without coding or game development experience, to simply describe their game ideas and see them materialize instantly.
The subnet focuses on generating high-quality 3D models for use in gaming, digital twins, virtual environments, and more. It uses advanced AI technologies, including Gaussian splats, to create realistic 3D objects and worlds in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Bittensor Subnet 17 is empowering individuals to create worlds and games through simple descriptions, thereby democratizing 3D content creation, enabling anyone to develop virtual worlds, games, and AR/VR/XR experiences. This subnet utilizes a diverse array of existing Open Source 3D generative models, including Gaussian Splatting, Neural Radiance Fields, 3D Diffusion Models, and Point-Cloud approaches.
By integrating these models into decentralized incentive-based networks via Bittensor, the subnet aims to foster innovation. Its goal is to initiate a gaming revolution centered around AI-native games, utilizing the broader Bittensor ecosystem to enable real-time generation of assets, voice, and sound. This approach empowers creative individuals, even those without coding or game development experience, to simply describe their game ideas and see them materialize instantly.
The subnet focuses on generating high-quality 3D models for use in gaming, digital twins, virtual environments, and more. It uses advanced AI technologies, including Gaussian splats, to create realistic 3D objects and worlds in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Three Gen is specifically built to address the challenges faced by industries such as gaming, film, VFX, and digital twins when creating 3D content. This subnet uses a novel AI-driven approach, combining neural networks and Gaussian splats, a more efficient alternative to traditional 3D rendering techniques like meshes and neural radiance fields (nerfs).
The subnet aims to democratize content creation by providing high-quality, AI-generated 3D assets at a fraction of the cost and time it would traditionally take, making it accessible to both large AAA studios and indie game developers.
Early Development & Foundation:
Transition to Bit Tensor & Incentive Design:
Core Technology and Use Cases:
Third-Party Integration and Open-Source Data:
Refining the Technology & Expanding the Reach:
Widening Applications and Industry Adoption:
Future Outlook and Community Engagement:
Three Gen is specifically built to address the challenges faced by industries such as gaming, film, VFX, and digital twins when creating 3D content. This subnet uses a novel AI-driven approach, combining neural networks and Gaussian splats, a more efficient alternative to traditional 3D rendering techniques like meshes and neural radiance fields (nerfs).
The subnet aims to democratize content creation by providing high-quality, AI-generated 3D assets at a fraction of the cost and time it would traditionally take, making it accessible to both large AAA studios and indie game developers.
Early Development & Foundation:
Transition to Bit Tensor & Incentive Design:
Core Technology and Use Cases:
Third-Party Integration and Open-Source Data:
Refining the Technology & Expanding the Reach:
Widening Applications and Industry Adoption:
Future Outlook and Community Engagement:
Founder/CEO: Ben James is the founder who started the company that later became Subnet 17. His background in research and collaboration with the gaming and VFX industries plays a significant role in building the subnet.
Tech Lead: Max, who oversees the technical direction of the subnet. He plays a key role in shaping the technology that powers the subnet and its integration with the Bittensor network.
Marketing & Business Development Lead: Monica, responsible for the marketing and business development aspects, ensuring the technology reaches the right audience.
Team Size: Around 10 people. The team primarily comes from research, with experience in 3D technology, gaming, VFX, and virtual worlds.
Background: The team has deep expertise in both Web 2.0 and 3D content creation, specifically in areas like VFX, gaming, and metaverses. They have a history of working with large developers and studios, especially in Europe, and have leveraged EU research funding to develop their technology. Their experience spans building virtual worlds using image processing and computer vision in the gaming sector.
Founder/CEO: Ben James is the founder who started the company that later became Subnet 17. His background in research and collaboration with the gaming and VFX industries plays a significant role in building the subnet.
Tech Lead: Max, who oversees the technical direction of the subnet. He plays a key role in shaping the technology that powers the subnet and its integration with the Bittensor network.
Marketing & Business Development Lead: Monica, responsible for the marketing and business development aspects, ensuring the technology reaches the right audience.
Team Size: Around 10 people. The team primarily comes from research, with experience in 3D technology, gaming, VFX, and virtual worlds.
Background: The team has deep expertise in both Web 2.0 and 3D content creation, specifically in areas like VFX, gaming, and metaverses. They have a history of working with large developers and studios, especially in Europe, and have leveraged EU research funding to develop their technology. Their experience spans building virtual worlds using image processing and computer vision in the gaming sector.
Launched tools: The Unity plugin (v0.4.0) and Blender add-on (v0.9.0) are live (early 2025 releases). The Discord bot has been available longer, and the integration was officially announced as a Verified Solution in Unity’s Asset Store. The team continues to update these: for instance, the guide notes that mesh-export options are “coming soon” for the Blender extension. Unity’s technical evaluation in April 2025 even led to tweaks in 404—GEN’s AI dependencies to ensure industrial-grade output.
Dataset milestones: In April 2025 404—GEN released a 21.5 million model open-source 3D dataset (touting it as “by far the largest” such dataset). This dataset (built via subnet mining) includes metadata linking each model to its prompt and creator. As of writing, the full dataset is available on request to researchers, with samples on Hugging Face. The subnet is also building tooling (“decentralized storage” and a data front end) so that over time anyone can browse or query this asset corpus. In essence, 404—GEN’s short-term roadmap has been to prove the concept: launch easy generation tools and amass a large content library.
Mid-term goals: 404—GEN’s whitepaper and interviews outline a vision of using these datasets to kickstart AI-native games. For example, they plan to align synthetic asset collections with specific game genres (“modding and vertical creation around a specific game genre and/or art style”). These initial asset packs will seed simple games or mods. Over the next year they intend to expand their front-end interfaces (better GUI, more developer plugins) and foster partnerships so game developers can quickly build prototype games.
Long-term vision: Ultimately, 404—GEN aims to become a foundational creative engine for entertainment. As viral AI-made games appear, the subnet will gain traction and spur network effects. The whitepaper sketches a future where entire virtual worlds are made on-the-fly: a user describes a game in plain language and the combination of Gen 404 (3D), voice subnets, and others generates the whole experience instantly. While such an “AI-native game OS” is still far off, 404—GEN’s roadmap (and recent progress) signals steady movement toward that goal.
Summary: In summary, Bittensor Subnet 17 – Gen 404 is a decentralized text-to-3D AI subnet whose goal is to open up 3D worldbuilding to everyone. It does so by running a permissionless network of miners/validators that continually generate and validate AI-created 3D assets. The subnet is already functional: it offers Unity, Blender and Discord interfaces, has garnered press attention (from GamesBeat to BlockchainGamer), and is building a massive open dataset. Its role in the Bittensor ecosystem is to provide the 3D content “leg” of a future fully-AI-driven metaverse, interoperating with other subnets for voice, text, and beyond.
Launched tools: The Unity plugin (v0.4.0) and Blender add-on (v0.9.0) are live (early 2025 releases). The Discord bot has been available longer, and the integration was officially announced as a Verified Solution in Unity’s Asset Store. The team continues to update these: for instance, the guide notes that mesh-export options are “coming soon” for the Blender extension. Unity’s technical evaluation in April 2025 even led to tweaks in 404—GEN’s AI dependencies to ensure industrial-grade output.
Dataset milestones: In April 2025 404—GEN released a 21.5 million model open-source 3D dataset (touting it as “by far the largest” such dataset). This dataset (built via subnet mining) includes metadata linking each model to its prompt and creator. As of writing, the full dataset is available on request to researchers, with samples on Hugging Face. The subnet is also building tooling (“decentralized storage” and a data front end) so that over time anyone can browse or query this asset corpus. In essence, 404—GEN’s short-term roadmap has been to prove the concept: launch easy generation tools and amass a large content library.
Mid-term goals: 404—GEN’s whitepaper and interviews outline a vision of using these datasets to kickstart AI-native games. For example, they plan to align synthetic asset collections with specific game genres (“modding and vertical creation around a specific game genre and/or art style”). These initial asset packs will seed simple games or mods. Over the next year they intend to expand their front-end interfaces (better GUI, more developer plugins) and foster partnerships so game developers can quickly build prototype games.
Long-term vision: Ultimately, 404—GEN aims to become a foundational creative engine for entertainment. As viral AI-made games appear, the subnet will gain traction and spur network effects. The whitepaper sketches a future where entire virtual worlds are made on-the-fly: a user describes a game in plain language and the combination of Gen 404 (3D), voice subnets, and others generates the whole experience instantly. While such an “AI-native game OS” is still far off, 404—GEN’s roadmap (and recent progress) signals steady movement toward that goal.
Summary: In summary, Bittensor Subnet 17 – Gen 404 is a decentralized text-to-3D AI subnet whose goal is to open up 3D worldbuilding to everyone. It does so by running a permissionless network of miners/validators that continually generate and validate AI-created 3D assets. The subnet is already functional: it offers Unity, Blender and Discord interfaces, has garnered press attention (from GamesBeat to BlockchainGamer), and is building a massive open dataset. Its role in the Bittensor ecosystem is to provide the 3D content “leg” of a future fully-AI-driven metaverse, interoperating with other subnets for voice, text, and beyond.
A big thank you to Tao Stats for producing these insightful videos in the Novelty Search series. We appreciate the opportunity to dive deep into the groundbreaking work being done by Subnets within Bittensor! Check out some of their other videos HERE.
In this session, the team behind Subnet 17 discusses their innovative AI-powered subnet built on Bittensor, designed to revolutionize 3D content creation for industries like gaming, VFX, architecture, and digital twins. The conversation highlights the subnet’s unique approach to generating high-quality, scalable 3D models using Gaussian splats—an efficient alternative to traditional 3D representation methods like meshes and neural radiance fields. They dive into the team’s background, the challenges they aim to solve, and the technology’s potential to democratize 3D content creation for both indie developers and large studios. The discussion also covers the subnet’s incentive design, validation mechanism, and the real-world applications of their technology, from gaming to high-profile art exhibitions like the Venice Architecture Biennale. The session showcases the rapid evolution of the subnet and its impact on virtual worlds, with insights into future developments and user-driven features like 2D-to-3D model generation.
7 days after 2D→3D went live:
- Internal & third-party benchmarks score higher visual quality than all public models.
( https://doc.404.xyz/31-oct-benchmark )
- Web2 integrations underway: two creator platforms already signed API integrations.
More details coming soon
The next chapter of 404 is loading...
The subnet.
The model.
The game.
The apps.
Details drop soon.
Most AI creation tools fall into Category 1:
generate → share → forget
We’re building foundational tech — Category 2:
generate → build → evolve
Bittensor incentivizes us to keep creation continuous
Exciting announcements coming soon.
BRAINDUMP ON VIRAL LOOPS #2
(posted recently about the science of viral loops from the Web 2.0 days -- see replies for the first post)
You'll often notice that very viral products tend to fall into one of two buckets:
Category 1:
very simple apps that do one thing, and that one…
From 2D→3D in under a minute
Now this elephant is ready to roam 🐘
Generate your own 3D animal with our free Blender Add-on:
404—GEN Blender Add-on
404—GEN is a free 3D model generator plugin that creates meshes and splats. You can use text prompts or images...
404gen.gumroad.com
Decentralized 3D in motion 🛹
Powered by Bittensor SN17
From 2D stills to 3D chills 👻
Conjure your own 3D haunted house for free with our Blender Add-on 🕯️
404—GEN Blender Add-on
404—GEN is a free 3D model generator plugin that creates meshes and splats. You can use text prompts or images...
404gen.gumroad.com