Ben James is the founder and CEO of Atlas and 404-GEN. Atlas helps AAA studios like Square Enix, Parallel, and others accelerate 3D asset creation through AI-driven generation pipelines. After discovering Bittensor in early 2024, Ben saw the potential to design a subnet that served as an open engine for 3D model generation where researchers could collectively push the frontier of state-of-the-art.
For the launch of this newsletter, we chose Ben because 404-GEN represents what a model subnet looks like in practice. The team combines deep expertise in incentive design with equally deep roots in the industry they’re building for—gaming—allowing them to drive real demand into their network. At the same time, 404-GEN balances immediate product utility with long-term R&D, building in a way that satisfies what’s needed to sustain a crypto network with a token, while still pushing the technology frontier forward.
We hope you enjoy this conversation with Ben.
What’s the elevator pitch for 404-GEN?
“404–GEN is a generative AI technology company that leverages decentralization to incentivize building & improving 3D foundational models on Bittensor Subnet 17. The vision of the company is to democratize content creation and enable a new genre of AI-native virtual world building.”
Can you walk us through how 404-GEN’s incentive mechanism works and how it’s evolved over time?
“Our incentive mechanism has evolved significantly from an early focus on industry standard benchmarks, including speed of generation, prompt-similarity and artifact detections. As miners began consistently surpassing those thresholds, we introduced a direct competition model inspired by chess’ Elo ranking. Miners today must not only outperform a wide suite of industry benchmarks, but they must also ‘duel’ other miners on identical prompts, with a Visual Language Model judging the winner. Every duel is logged to a public dashboard, with explanations provided by the VLM, creating both transparency and a strong incentive for miners to continually improve. As far as we are aware, this is the first such Elo-based ranking system present on any subnet.”
How do the 3D assets produced by 404-GEN compare to those from closed and open-source systems? How close are you to state-of-the-art?
“404–GEN’s outputs are competitive with, and in many cases surpass, state-of-the-art closed-source systems. On an aesthetic level, today they’re already suitable for secondary assets in production-quality games. For primary assets, some post-processing (such as rigging, modularization) may still be needed, but 404’s models are already being used to rapidly prototype highly detailed hero assets.”
Left is SOTA according to a16z, right is SN 17 for the same prompt (“a bonsai tree in a pot”)
What integrations, products, or services are being built on top of 404-GEN?
“Games are the earliest and clearest proof of product-market fit, with developers using 404-GEN via workflow plug-ins and API integrations. A typical game developer spends 30-60% of their budget on creating 3D assets, and we see very similar value propositions in increased creative efficiency / output gains for related industries including film, VFX, and XR. Beyond these creative industries, the subnet’s recent introduction of 2D inputs and our early research into larger world models using gaussian splat technology point to even larger opportunities around digital twins - a massive area for future growth including RL environments for virtual training and simulation.”
How are creators using the Unity Asset Store plugin so far? Is this an area of focus for you moving forward?
“We have hundreds of downloads each month from the Unity Asset Store, suggesting that users are actively using 404 to integrate into their games. Moving forward, we place a keen emphasis on lowering friction by embedding 404 directly into the tools creatives already use - Unity being a prime example. Unity in particular is an impressive feat given that 1) we are the first decentralised 3D model generation to be an official Verified Solution and 2) it enables generation directly “in engine” to Unity’s 1.2M monthly active users, which strengthens adoption and creates natural switching costs over time.”
We know a big focus for these 3D assets are within games, but these assets can be used in other domains. What are some of the most non-intuitive or surprising ways creators have used 404-GEN?
“One standout and specific example came at the Super AI conference in Singapore earlier this year, where I met a developer who had built a VR game with 404-GEN assets after discovering us through Unity - without even knowing about Bittensor. It was a reminder that while we often focus on ‘how’ assets are generated (via Bittensor), many users care only about the quality of the result. It also underscored XR as a promising frontier: despite slower mainstream adoption, its demand for novel 3D content is immense, and 404 is already being used to fill that gap. We’re also aware of requests to physically 3D print outputs and build design businesses based on the outputs - some of these more surprising use cases may be the result of exposure 404 has had in significant web2 events including the ongoing Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2025 Osaka World Expo.”
One of the more under-the-radar artifacts from your subnet is the massive dataset of high quality 3D assets your miners have generated. How large has that become now? How is your team/external teams thinking about making use of this dataset?
“The dataset has grown to over 28M 3D models, and we’ve been sharing access with a variety of research groups in the US, Europe and Asia. A key goal of this dataset is to encourage research into new open source models that can push the industry forward and ultimately fuel a fly-wheel that helps miners to create better subnet outputs. We see strong monetization potential as well when curated and made accessible in consumer-friendly formats, such as asset packs, bulk access marketplaces, or integration into consumer-facing platforms.”
Do you plan on driving a portion of the company’s revenue back into the token?
“Yes. We’re taking a market-oriented approach to building our subnet - using early adopters to identify must-have features (such as our recent 2D input integration), driving adoption through that customer discovery, and ultimately opening greater paths to revenue. This value will flow back into the token to reinforce the ecosystem’s growth.”
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