Open Conversations: The Only Way Forward Is User-Owned AI (Illia Polosukhin)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 2:38
User-owned AI matters, the speaker argues, because control of AI currently sits with a few companies while trust in institutions is at a low point. An AI on the user's side could act as advocate and interface to the rest of the world, but only if the user owns it rather than another company coordinating everyone's life. Near, described as a blockchain for AI, is built around an ecosystem in which participants are economically aligned and incentivised to create value, with blockchain handling payment and coordination.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
Transcript
User own AI is extremely important. Right now the control is in the hands of a few companies and corporations. And so user own AI is really about flipping that control and giving it back to the individual users and communities. We are going from a society where we have been delegating our decision-m to other entities be that government or corporations or institutions and this trust is actually falling apart. Trust institutions is at lowest it has ever been. AI is changing that in a fundamental way that if you have a user on AI, if you have AI that's on your side, this AI is able to connect and evaluate every single option in the
world, it is able to be your advocate and your interface to the rest of the world and really find the best option for you. But it is fundamental that that AI is userowned, right? not just some another company that actually coordinating everybody's life. That relationship of our trust with AI is what I'm really kind of believe need to be developed and focused on. So our approach has been how do we build an ecosystem where on one side everybody is economically aligned and incentivized to create value and kind of grow the ecosystem and on the other side contributing back to the ecosystem itself. Fundamentally what we're trying
to do is enable everyone to be on this journey. And for us blockchain was really about solving this problem like how do we pay them? How do we kind of coordinate them in this effort? That's really been the thread is like how do we really enable this blockchain technology to become this interface between kind of users and and what they're trying to achieve. What we see is more and more of the services and how we going to interface with computing is going to be through AI. And so that's why Near is really kind of this blockchain for AI to really connect the species from both sides. you know everything from like identity mining market uh on one side to building out what is the confidential
computing and verifiable computing for AI. I think people underestimate how much internet is going to change in the next 5 years because of that. And so that's like what you know near has been trying to build continue building and we're inviting more people to really contribute to this mission. [Music] [Music]