Introducing Manako

Full article source: Score Subnet

Manako is the flagship product from Score, the team behind Bittensor Subnet 44 (SN44), focused on building an open and permissionless computer vision layer — initially with a strong emphasis on sports, but designed to extend far beyond.

Announced publicly on January 22, 2026, Manako represents the culmination of months of work, during which Score announced multiple industry partnerships to validate their underlying technology.

Core Purpose and Positioning

Manako is positioned as the “Claude for computer vision”, a direct analogy to how Claude (and similar LLMs) dramatically simplified software development and coding.

Just as conversational AI assistants removed many barriers to writing code, Manako aims to remove the traditional barriers to computer vision development.

It eliminates the need for:

• Deep expertise in machine learning
• Knowledge of model architecture
• Complex infrastructure management

Instead, users can create powerful, advanced Vision AI models and analysis pipelines simply through natural conversation (chatting with the system).

Key Characteristics

• Described by community members (echoing the team’s vision) as “a platform that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the market today”.
• Acts as a kind of “control plane” for visual intelligence, where data, policies, and operators come together.
• Designed to move computer vision from being primarily a research domain into something that delivers real-world impact in physical environments and production systems.
• Built for real operators and people running live systems, enabling them to achieve significantly more (described as “1,000x more”) when vision capabilities are packaged as a polished, usable AI product.

Development Status (as of announcement)

The team reported being already two months ahead of their internal plan for Manako, with current focus on polish, usability, and deep integration with the Bittensor subnet itself.

Broader Context

Manako builds on Score’s mission to democratize visual intelligence and make every camera intelligent. It serves as the user-facing, accessible interface and product layer on top of the decentralized computer vision infrastructure the subnet has been developing.

TL;DR

Manako = conversational computer vision development — the place where anyone can build sophisticated vision AI without traditional ML barriers, in the same transformative way that tools like Claude reshaped software engineering.