Quasar unveils 120B-parameter AI model amid scrutiny over training provenance

A decentralized AI project just learned the hard way that the crypto community is very good at checking receipts. Quasar, operating as Subnet 24 on the Bittensor network, released what it called a groundbreaking 120 billion-parameter model with a 5 million-token context window. Within hours, independent researchers found that roughly 96-98% of its weights were nearly identical to an existing model from Ant Group. The fallout was swift. The SN24 alpha token dropped approximately 70-75% in a single trading session. The model and the mismatch Quasar, spearheaded by SILX AI, had been building toward this moment for months. The project released Quasar-Preview, a model with around 20 billion total parameters, and Quasar-3B back in April 2026. Both were positioned as stepping stones toward a much larger model trained entirely through decentralized methods on the Bittensor network. The 120B release was supposed to be the payoff. SILX AI marketed the model as a triumph of decentralized training, complete with promised architectural innovations like something called a “Loop Transformer” and “Engram memory.” These features were meant to solve the memory and coherence problems that plague stan...