No Priors Ep. 32 | With NEAR’s Illia Polosukhin

More than 25 million users are using NEAR-powered applications. Co-founder of NEAR protocol and Transformers author Illia Polosukhin joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the intersections of crypto and AI technology, what we should expect from AI agents, decentralized data labeling, why AI’s alignment problem is really a human problem, and more.

NEAR allows users to effortlessly create and distribute innovative decentralized apps across any blockchain, while helping build a more open web. Before co-founding NEAR, Illia researched AI at Google and co-authored the landmark paper, "Attention Is All You Need."

00:00 - Blockchain, AI, and Web3 Intersection
09:58 - Blockchain and AI
16:07 - Blockchain and AI Integration Challenges
23:35 - Inference and Decentralized Data Labeling
30:13 - Web 3 and AI SaaS Challenges
38:18 - The Future of Hardware Accelerators

[danielwilliamson]

The human race thanks you for the paper Illia! Every time I hear a web3 idea, I compare it to the strongest web2 version I see possible, and I'm generally left with the web3 version giving only marginal value. So many things have to go right. I'm absolutely ignorant in the domain and Illia sounds like one of the most knowledgeable though. Happy to be proven wrong in the long run! Thanks for the pod Illia/sarah/elad! #NOPRIORSGANGGANG

[rahulgoel]

Never thought about the fact that crypto could superpower AI agents.

[oiuhwoechwe]

my bank is still asking me to set up voice identification instead of a password. lol. problem is "we record your calls for training and monitoring purposes" - that's going to be an interesting database to exfiltrate.