Developing Near’s Blockchain and Adding AI by Illia Polosukhin
Developing Near’s Blockchain and Adding AI Building Near Blockchain, by Illia Polosukhin
Building a blockchain protocol was not Illia Polosukhin’s intention. A native of Ukraine, Polosukhin has been drawn to machine learning and artificial intelligence since he was ten years old. He speculates that his fascination may have started after watching “The Matrix” and the surprisingly underrated “AI”
In this article, we have explained the interview with Illia Polosukhin on the topic of near blockchain development. Read to know more about blockchain and adding AI by Illia Polosukhin.
Polosukhin was also intelligent. genius even. To focus on creating the models and tools that would eventually be used for artificial intelligence, he joined Google Research in 2014. He advanced research by co-authoring papers and publishing them. However, he wanted to do more. “Google has many advantages and is a wonderful learning environment, but it is very slow,” asserts Polosukhin. “I wanted to move faster. I wanted to create a startup.
The consensus event in Austin this year has Illia Polosukhin as speaker.
That is why he founded NEAR in 2017 together with Alexander Skidanov.
AI, which at first was exclusively concerned with artificial intelligence. It was not related to cryptocurrency, blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFT) or inventory.
That was then. Naturally, one of the most famous blockchain protocols on the market today is called Near, which has 25 million users, 446,000 daily transactions and a thriving ecosystem of decentralized applications (apps) and initiatives. It is one of many smart contract initiatives attempting to challenge Ethereum’s existing hegemony.
But perhaps all this is a formality. Polosukhin has much bigger ideas. “We want to hit one billion users,” Polosukhin declares as he discusses the transition from artificial intelligence (AI) to cryptocurrency, the rationale behind the introduction of Near’s “Blockchain Operating System,” and how AI may once again play a role in the company’s future. Bonus? He explains why, in his opinion, technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence can save humanity.
For the sake of clarity, the interview has been slightly trimmed and reduced.
As a result, when you first started, you had almost no connection to the blockchain.
Exact. It’s AI only. And when we were working on AI, we tried several different things, but nothing was very successful. Unlike other firms at the time, we didn’t have technology worth hundreds of millions of dollars to train models on. But we had a system for crowdsourcing.
It was a technology that helped us find students specifically, computer science students – all over the world. Russia, Poland, Ukraine and China. countries where students come from modest backgrounds and actually work for us for a pittance. We therefore have to pay them. And it was really challenging to send them money. That is quite challenging to achieve using the current financial structure. Blockchain came into play at this point.
This was back when there was no cheap way to send transactions, before the Lightning Network, right?
Yes. IOTA, EOS and other items of that nature were present. We examined everything there. We are also system engineers. We really have a way to defeat IOTA. EOS was also not functional. EOS had many brilliant concepts, but the execution was total [crap].
We finally decided to brainstorm possible solutions to this problem. We have also looked at Polkadot and Cosmos, but they are quite complicated. So we reasoned, “Well, well, let’s try to solve this.” That is why NEAR.AI developed into the Near Protocol in this way.
This was back when there was no cheap way to send transactions, before the Lightning Network, right?
Yes. IOTA, EOS and other items of that nature were present. We examined everything there. We are also system engineers. We really have a way to defeat IOTA. EOS was also not functional. EOS had many brilliant concepts, but the execution was total [crap].
We finally decided to brainstorm possible solutions to this problem. We have also looked at Polkadot and Cosmos, but they are quite complicated. So we reasoned, “Well, well, let’s try to solve this.” That is why NEAR.AI developed into the Near Protocol in this way.