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Cortex

CI License

An autonomous research network.

Cortex is building a shared research process on Bittensor subnet 100. Its goal is to turn independent AI experiments into reusable knowledge that improves the network's shared software, training methods, and data practices.

Understand Cortex in five minutes · Whitepaper · Documentation · Start contributing research

Why Cortex exists

A competition that only selects a finished model checkpoint can lose the most useful part of research: how the result was obtained. If recipes stay private, the next contributor must discover them again. A fixed, visible benchmark can also reward tuning to the test rather than an improvement that works elsewhere.

Cortex's proposed alternative is verified research as the unit of work: a claim, reproducible code, a data manifest, a compute budget, and measured evidence. The aim is to retain useful methods from many contributors, not just the weights of one winner.

The whitepaper, §7 describes the next step: an autonomous agent combines proven findings into a proposed update to the shared stack. That update must pass evaluation against the current stack before adoption. This synthesis agent is a goal, not a shipped component. See the paper-to-code comparison for what exists today.

The research loop

  1. Set a research goal. Operators publish a question, evaluation rules, and a measured reference result.
  2. Run experiments. Contributors, called miners, submit a claim with the code, experiment files, and compute budget needed to check it.
  3. Check the result. The intended evaluation reproduces the experiment and measures it on private test data against the reference.
  4. Reward useful work. Challenge scores feed signed reward calculations that validators verify before submitting weights to Bittensor.
  5. Build on what worked. Preserve the research recipe for reuse. Automated synthesis and verified adoption into a shared stack remain future work.

Autonomous describes the research workflow the network is building. It does not mean the current system operates without people: operators choose topics, configure evaluation, and adjudicate bug reports. Validators verify the signed results and reward calculation; they do not independently repeat every experiment.

Two ways to contribute

Challenge Useful work Share of network emissions
Proof Reproducible AI research against published topics 80%
Bounty Verified bugs in Cortex products and backend services 20%

Proof rewards follow each topic's rules: the best result wins, or qualifying discoveries share rewards. Bounty rewards depend on report accuracy and severity. These are configured allocations, not guaranteed earnings or investment returns.

What exists today

This repository includes the submission tools, challenge services, evaluation components, validator software, and deployment tooling.

Implemented components are not the same as an end-to-end research system:

  • Proof has signed topics, submission intake, evaluation guards, and winner/discovery payout functions. The Python judge is still partial, submission state is in memory, and the service does not yet drive automatic reward-leaf emission. The complete autonomous research loop is not implemented.
  • Proof evaluation needs an open topic, verified private test data, a sealed baseline, a pinned evaluation image, and configured Lium and judge access.
  • Bounty needs a readable public scoring feed from CortexLM/backend. A valid report without an assigned severity cannot earn a reward.
  • Missing scoring prerequisites cause 503 refusals. Check ctx status before spending compute, but do not treat readiness alone as proof of reproduction or an end-to-end payment path.

See implementation status and known limits. This README describes the software, not a claim that every research topic is open or every deployment is ready.

Get started

The public gateway is https://network.cortex.foundation.

Install the ctx command-line tool using scripts/install-ctx.sh:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CortexLM/cortex/main/scripts/install-ctx.sh | sh
ctx challenges
ctx status

Then follow the Proof guide, Bounty guide, or validator guide. Never put wallet recovery phrases or challenge signing keys in a miner client.

Explore the project

I want to… Start here
Understand the opportunity and current limits Project overview
Find a guide Documentation index
Understand the software Architecture
Run the network Deployment
Contribute code Contributing
Get help or report a vulnerability Support · Security

The implementation uses Rust, with Python for research evaluation. These are implementation choices, not the definition of Cortex. Historical BASE_* names remain where required for compatibility, as explained in Naming.

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.