A Positive Vision for the Future: Part 2 with Illia Polosukhin of NEAR

**Stephen Johnson** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:31)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share part 2 of my conversation with Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the seminal Attention Is All You Need paper, and founder of NEAR Protocol, which describes itself as the blockchain for AI, and aims to build a future where AI belongs to everyone. In part 1, we explored the foundational technology stack, proof-of-state consensus mechanisms, confidential computing on GPUs, and NEAR's plan to train frontier models on a decentralized basis, with contributions incentivized by cryptographically guaranteed revenue shares. Today, we zoom out from the enabling technology and discuss the big picture questions. What does personal computing look like as AI continues to eat traditional UI-centric software? Illia envisions a unified intelligence layer that works across all of your devices, predicts what you need, and proactively gets things done for you. How will this change the nature of markets, trade, and the consumer economy? Illia expects that advertising and middlemen will become less relevant, as AI agents allow buyers and sellers to connect directly at unprecedented scale. What does daily life look like, and how will we spend our time in the era of AI-provided abundance? In addition to a rise in personalized AI-generated entertainment products, Illia predicts that people will find meaning and compete for status in small communities focused on niche interests, including athletics, video games, the collection and curation of unique artifacts, and who knows what else. What rules should govern agent-to-agent interactions in this world? Illia imagines a symbiotic relationship between individual humans and their own personal AIs, such that humans and AIs effectively grow up together. And he believes that AIs should pursue the interests of their individual humans, even if that means being less than fully transparent when negotiating with other AIs on their human's behalf. And finally, what new governance mechanisms could allow us to take advantage of the exponential increase in information processing power and reasoning that AI affords us? Illia describes NEAR's experiments with AI delegates, which vote on behalf of token holders, who in turn select them based on their decision-making frameworks, and also describes NEAR's long-term goal of enabling every individual to have their own AI that participates in governance on their behalf. Of course, we touch on lots more along the way as well, including the role of formal verification of software in securing smart contracts, the remaining challenges required to effectively bridge the gap between low-level guarantees and high-level human intentions, and the need to harden society's defenses in order to maintain global biosecurity in the presence of broadly distributed, powerful AI systems. Overall, while many questions remain to be answered, Illia's strength as a systems-level thinker, spanning technology, economics, social dynamics, and governance, is evident throughout. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy one of the most concrete, positive visions for the future that you will find anywhere. From Illia Polosukhin, founder of NEAR. Illia Polosukhin, founder of NEAR. Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Illia Polosukhin** (3:38)
Thanks for having me back.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:40)
I'm excited for Part 2 So last time we talked a lot about foundational technology, the journey that you went on from being an author of Attention Is All You Need to try to source data from contributors around the world, struggling to pay them, taking a detour into blockchain, thinking it would take just a few months. Here we are a few years later, and it's all really happening. Anybody who's listened to this feed for more than a minute knows that I often say the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future, and I appreciate that you have one. So I'm really appreciative that you're taking a second window here to help us unpack that. I guess maybe for starters, one of the jumping off points last time was, you said you wanted to teach computers to code, and sure enough, now they can code. So maybe as we ramp up into a vision of potentially quite different future, how is the rise of AI Coding Assistance changing how you guys work? And how is it changing who can create stuff on top of the blockchain?

**Illia Polosukhin** (4:46)
Yeah. Well, I don't think it's even about blockchain per se, but the real reason why I always thought that as computers are able to code, we're actually approaching a different world.