But the most important thing is simpler: it is towards AI that hot money and investor attention are now directed. The capital that once chased crypto is now chasing compute, chip, and model builders, and every advance in what these systems can do broadens that appeal.
Each result, like Fable’s conclusion on the Jacobian conjecture, strengthens the case for investing capital in AI and poses a difficult conundrum for crypto investors: why hold a token that trades as a sidecar of the AI cycle when someone can own the vehicle itself?
The AI capability curve is steep, and the steeper it gets, the further the market’s risk appetite shifts away from everything else, including crypto.
What was really the problem?
Think of a machine that takes two numbers and returns two new numbers, using only addition and multiplication. The question, first asked in 1939, was whether the machine could always work backwards: from its answer alone, could the two original numbers be recovered each time?
Mathematicians had a quick way to check if a machine seemed reversible. The Jacobian conjecture said that if a machine passed this check, it should always be reversible.
For 87 years, no one could prove it was true and no one could find a machine that broke the rule.
