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Ilya Polosukhin

Ilya Polosukhin

Co-founder of NEAR Protocol; co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper; AI researcher and entrepreneur focused on user-owned AI infrastructure and blockchain.

Jun 19, 2026

AnsemHOST
56:59
How do you think about bridging that gap between the people in crypto, the coins in crypto communicating with each other, and then applications who may not be in crypto now and trying to pitch them on why they should be using Near, why they should be using blockchain for whatever their AI needs? um use cases are
57:18
yeah so it really depends they do that i think crypto done a really bad job historically at doing this where it was like let's just bazooka some money at people and uh you know they will use blockchain So how we are approaching it is very much use case based.
57:35
From AI perspective, if you talk to anyone who's doing medical, legal, even finance to some extent, and especially outside of US, they have massive concerns with data privacy.
57:48
In Europe, it's very much regulator driven.
57:51
In some other countries, it's very much distrust to some of the institutions in US.
57:57
And so they need private solutions.
57:59
They need the ability to have something that's not going to get blocked and disabled by whatever whim of some company.
AnsemHOST
61:50
Can you tell us a little bit about, I guess, why Near specifically is a better L1 than other L1s for AI and for agents? I know that may not be apparent to people at the forefront.

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