

The Decentralized Future of Private AI with Illia Polosukhin - #749
74 snips Sep 30, 2025
Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the groundbreaking 'Attention Is All You Need' paper and co-founder of Near AI, dives into the intersection of decentralization and private AI. He shares his journey from Google to revolutionizing blockchain with the NEAR Protocol. Topics include confidential computing for user data protection and the risks of AI centralization. Illia emphasizes a trust-building approach through open model training and formal verification. He also explores tokenized incentives for data contributions and the future of privacy in AI deployment.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
From Transformer Research To Blockchain Payments
- Illia left Google before the Transformer paper was published to build products using the architecture.
- He then founded NEAR Protocol after pay challenges for global data-labelers exposed a payments problem.
Micropayments Sparked NEAR Protocol
- Near started as a solution to pay computer science students in countries where traditional payments failed.
- That payments work evolved into NEAR Protocol, now serving millions monthly.
User-Owned Decentralized Cloud
- NEAR combined blockchain principles and user-ownership to rethink how AI platforms are governed.
- This led to building a decentralized confidential cloud that keeps user data and models private.