User-Owned AI: On-Chain Training, Inference, and Agents, with NEAR's Illia Polosukhin

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Illia Polosukhin, founder of Nier, a hyper-ambitious, multi-faceted project that describes itself as the blockchain for AI, and aims to build a future where AI belongs to everyone. Illia is not your average blockchain founder. Before starting Nier, he was one of eight co-authors of the seminal 2017 paper, Attention Is All You Need, which of course introduced the transformer architecture and helped launch the current AI revolution. The credits on that paper say that Illia and another co-author quote, designed and implemented the first transformer models and were quote, crucially involved in every aspect of this work. And in fact, Nier started as an AI project, but took a major detour into crypto when Illia and team realized just how difficult it was for them to pay their data task workers all around the world. Today, given his pedigree, Illia could no doubt command one of those mythical billion-dollar comp packages from Zuck's superintelligence labs. But instead, he's building the foundational infrastructure for user-owned, privacy-preserving AI that can operate at global scale. In this conversation, we start with foundational principles and work our way up the technology stack. We begin with an overview of how Nier's proof-of-stake consensus mechanism creates security for network participants without requiring trust in a centralized authority. In short, because the protocol is open and permissionless, anyone who is willing to put value at risk can become a validator, and thus no one can prevent the flow of valid transactions. From there, we discuss how Nier is leveraging Nvidia's confidential computing capabilities to create a permissionless network that allows anyone with compatible GPU hardware to sell inference compute, while keeping both the model weights and user data private, even from the hardware operators, all with only a 5% overhead relative to normal computing. To be honest, I hadn't realized just how affordable this privacy layer has become. And while it does require trust in the chip maker, it's clearly a huge deal for all sorts of scenarios, and does seem to help explain how it is that frontier model developers have been able to ship their models to so many different inference partners without leaking the model weights.
After that, we dig into Nier's plans to decentralize model training itself, with a process that allows contributors to provide whatever compute or data they have in exchange for a cryptographically guaranteed share of the model's future revenue. While it does remain to be seen whether a community-driven project can produce a 1 trillion parameter model that performs at the level of today's leaders, at a minimum, Illia and team seem to have designed an incentive structure that could make it worthwhile for folks to contribute the estimated $100 million worth of resources that's required to compete at that level. Finally, we talk about what AI and crypto can do for one another, including how AI might finally put the smart in smart contracts, and how blockchain technology can provide stronger guarantees that AI agents will act only as intended. This is something that I've been envisioning, if only in quite fuzzy terms, for years, and so I was really excited to hear just how concrete it's starting to become. In the end, I was so eager to understand the foundational technology on which Illia's vision rests, that we barely had time for the vision itself. But I do think this is really valuable knowledge. And the good news is that we've already scheduled another recording, so definitely stay tuned for part two, in which we'll explore the applications that people are already starting to build at this intersection of AI and crypto, and also try to get a handle on the giga-agent future, by exploring Illia's vision for how AI agents will interact, transact, and even participate in governance. With that, I hope you enjoy this technical deep dive into the infrastructure for user-owned privacy-preserving AI, with Illia Polosukhin, founder of Neer. Illia Polosukhin, founder of Neer Protocol. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Illia Polosukhin** (4:03)
Thanks for having me.

**Erik Torenberg** (4:05)
I'm excited for this conversation. I think this is going to be one that I'm going to learn even more than I usually do, because you're right at the intersection of AI and crypto, and sometimes these two technology waves are characterized as different camps that don't understand each other or at times are in some sort of online rivalry that may be mostly made up. But I've got this sneaking suspicion that I've never quite been able to fully develop that these two technologies actually might really need each other. To reach their fullest potential, and to do so in a way that we can keep control of over time. So I'm really excited to dig into all of that with you. For starters, though, if my deep research reports are to be believed, and this wasn't hallucinated, I do know for a fact that you were one of the authors of the original Transformers paper. But then I understand from deep research that this project that we now know as the Nier Protocol started as an AI project and then sort of evolved into a crypto project before now kind of coming back to the intersection of crypto and AI. So I'd love to hear a little bit of the story of like how you went from an author of Attention Is All You Need to branching out on your own to realizing that you needed actually crypto as well as Attention. And yeah, just give us a little bit of that history and bring us up to the present day.