Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news. This week, NEAR co-founder and former Google AI researcher Illia Polosukhin joins the show to discuss the intersection of crypto and machine learning.

Show highlights:

whether Signature was shut down because of its crypto arm
whether banking crypto is riskier than banking other industries
how Balaji’s $1 million BTC bet is just highly effective marketing
whether the Fed is doing quantitative easing again
how the artificial intelligence industry has changed over the years
why Illia says that “open source always wins”
the intersection of blockchain technology and AI
whether a broken Tesla could become the world’s greatest investor

Hosts

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly
Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures
Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly

Guest

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of Near

Disclosures

Links

Signature and Banking

Balaji’s bet

Coin Edition: Balaji Bets $1M on Bitcoin Price, Says US Hyperinflation Is Underway

Artificial Intelligence:

Richard Sutton: The Bitter Lesson
Facebook: Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model
Stanford: Alpaca: A Strong, Replicable Instruction-Following Model

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02.03.2026