️AI x Blockchain: NEAR’s New Frontier for Data and AI Integration

[Music] thank you everyone for joining us um IIA it's really good to see you in UAE and Abu Dhabi um you know the AI has been big topic throughout this Finance week and addition to digital asset it seems like near is in the epicenter of those two big pillars that everyone has been talking about for a whole week um could you share us about bit about what near is yeah so first of all thank you for inviting and for HS any1 for hosting this and obviously uh Abu Dhabi and um the royal family yeah my belief and kind of vision is that AI will transform how we are interacting with compute how we interacting with internet how we do research and how do we advance kind of Technology going forward like in a way AI is a fundamentally last technology wave because uh every other technology wave after this will be built by I and if you think of this you don't want this to belong to one company you don't want this to be controlled by one country you don't want this to be limited in ways that you know some specific set of constraints you want this to be available to everyone and so that is the same effectively as money as a technology we don't want it to be limited by you know single party we don't want it to be you know easily censorable and so really like fundamentally it's on alignment on values and then when you actually need to implement like how do you achieve AI that is on your side right how do we make it user owned not corporate owned you need to really kind of Design Systems differently and that's where kind of blockchain Technology we technology comes in as a tool set to really build this differently and we can expand on that for sure and now with the recent sege with you know demand and resources dedicated to AI you know we're seeing Giga projects from different nations you know within us also in the UAE with like you know teams like g42 also in Saudi Arabia building bunch of data centers you know with this full stack approach of you know welcoming AI globally what is the role of blockchain layer and what is the role that near will be playing as you mentioned the user own and Community own AI it seems like it's becoming widened even to the electricity or energy to Data Centers and more yeah so the way I think of blockchain broadly is effectively that is your identity payment Global markets coordination tools right this is what enables effec to move everything around us and make it things happen AI then is the way you interact with all this the AI is the way you're going to be you know effectively the go kind of the Google and all of the steps you take before actions taken AI can just do that for you and indeed for that you need a lot of infrastructure to happen underneath so how do we do that well we need a market for compute we need to make sure that uh there's no kind of a single place where you know if that data center goes offline or if that uh kind of place you know applies restrictions to uh to whoever uses it it's not going to affect everybody else so we need a way to decentralize and kind of compute but to do that you also need to ensure privacy right right now one of the interesting challenges is when you're using for example open AI you know data goes to open AI right they give you terms of service you know good or bad when you right now if you consider using decentralized compute you don't actually even know where data is going so you need in kind of Ensure privacy which means you need endtoend encryption you need a very specialized way of doing that and uh as soon as you unlock that now now you have ability to effectively have compute everywhere right because it doesn't matter anymore if this is data center in your country or in somebody's country because you know it's enter encrypted and you you have guarantees cryptographic guarantees around this so now you have a global market of compute now everybody can you know optimize similar how Bitcoin been optimizing electricity been optimizing mining capacity across the global market we can have the same thing versus right now it's a very kind of uh you know nation state level and like gigantic Corporation level optimization so that's on the compute level on the model level same thing right now you need to be massive organization because you need to have access to compute and researchers to really make progress on these models and if you try to do this in open source right you're going to run out of money because as soon as you open source your model there's no monetization right so you either close source and you monetize it and effectively restrict access to this model or you open source and only if your meta which is printing you know tens of hundreds of billions of dollars you're able to do that uh and so again blockchain is a way to coordinate resources to create some products and then monetize them in a different way that we've monetize traditionally right again because we have the cryptographic tools we can actually monetize open source but encrypted weight models and we can funnel that Revenue back into effectively Next Generation model into the capital allocators into people who put their work to develop models now now you have a closed loop system where you can go and you know recruit more researchers create ecosystems of uh developers who are building on top of this that actually has money going through the system now we know how to raise Capital into that because you know you launch a token you now have people speculating on the future value of this model and so you creating kind of new economy new markets around that so effectively at every stage right as we building out the stack there is a opening up of a market that happens through the blockchain technology and it's really important to have that because if we don't right we know from kind of you know Central planning is always Limited in how it's done but it's especially limiting when we have such a powerful technology that is effectively going to enable you know massive GDP growth and massive like intellectual growth for everyone in the world right so it's really important that this is actually available globally kind of not not permissioned yeah I definitely agree and you know when we look back you know I think you've been building this for about six years and I been very honored to be joining the journey as an early investor and when I look back you know you were at Google before I was at Amazon as engineer you know things have been moving so fast and as you mentioned I think the key is really the coordination you know you've been building near which has become one of the largest blockchain globally and the largest in the AI ecosystem what are some of the coordination problems that you guys have been solving and what are some of the initiatives that near has today around AI such as you know you guys been running accelerator research Hub and more to come you know what are some of these things that people can learn about today and you know go back home research and contribute to your coordination layer I think the beauty of introducing near today is that it's not just open AI where you go wow and then go back home and don't do anything but near is open ecosystem where you can actually learn and then go and build or contribute or just use um so give us some guidance on how to participate yeah so as you mention coordination is effectively the core core piece and so we've been iterating a lot on different types of structures and I think generally the kind of really powerful coordination structure that works in crypto is this competitive cooperation right and like I use it a lot in in in kind of across um and actually interestingly I was reading uh about Visa and Visa started with the same values it started as this comp competitive Corporation of banks and then just kind of uh you know be and so this idea is like if you think of Bitcoin miners right they are all competing for you know producing a block but together they're creating something that's valuable on its own right they're creating this corporative value while competing for the block and so similar ideas um and so I was giving some of the examples effectively when you're thinking of AI research or when you're thinking of develop veloping AI systems agents um kind of applications uh you have a similar mechanics and so what we've been building with a research Hub is effectively a place where if you're a researcher developer um you can come in and you can you know suggest your ideas you can experiment uh we have the compute capabilities on the back end that are provided by S capital to train these models in a such a way that if this model is you know high quality if it's get used there is the re this Revenue gets generated right so this models are trained in so-called trusted execution environments this allows them to be private and verifiable and this allows effectively if I'm a researcher and I contributed some data or a model uh I'm able to capture some part of the revenue of this model in the future and so you can have kind of different researchers either competing against each other or cooperating right coming together and saying hey let's actually share our ideas and put them together into one model because together our model will be better right and so those are mechanisms that are somewhat happening inside you know Google research where I worked you know open AI but it happens on a kind of smaller scale and what we're trying to do is really open this up and create more of a market dynamics where people effectively can use this uh resources and kind of band together or compete against each other kind of to create this uh competitions similar thing happening on the kind of agentic layer application layer right um right now now kind of the way we see this evolving is everybody will have an AI assistant on their uh phone on their computer this AI assistant will be uh your representative on internet right it will know everything about you it will have access to your private data and it's really important that this runs privately right you don't want to give all your data to some other company that will be trying making money of it now this a assistant then uh will be able to go and say hey let's say we want to plan the trip to Abu Dhabi uh well I need to book a flight I need to get a hotel I need to get a car from airport I need to you know maybe uh book some fun experience here so it can actually use different agents who will execute this actions and so again we have a new uh effectively place for developers to come in and say hey I will build a best you know hotel booking agent that is able to provide such a good experience uh to the users and assistants or I will have you know I will find all of the different unique experiences in Abu Dhabi and provide them through this agent and make sure that people are able to experience you know in the whole uh kind of everything that Abu Dhabi has to offer so you can have all of this now kind of extensions that people can build and plug in and offer effectively a market uh where your assistant can choose which actions to take based on what these agents are offering so you have this different levels of effec uh contribution and importantly this is not just for Developers the tooling itself is maturing such that you as a non-developer can actually talk to agent Builder agent who who will build an agent for you right so this is becoming a lot more meta where it's more important for you to figure out the problem you're solving than to actually need no know how to write the code so I really think that kind of opens up a massive opportunity because it's effectively we're rebuilding a lot of the current Internet like all the websites right you know or some of the like even Instagram stuff where you're like oh here's the interesting things and we're turning it into more like action and you know there will be some recommendations as well to really Ena this experiences prior to kind of personalized for you and done by your agent right again right now on Google on Instagram those are companies trying to make money of you right whenever you do any action they're trying to make money of you and so we're trying to turn this around and have your assistant actually guiding you and maximizing your utility and your wellbeing thanks for a lot of the ideas on you know some of the founders to pursue some of these inspiration um what is you know um you've been sharing us a bit of a story around how near and blockchain based AI could be different you know maybe to imagine the ideal future case of what the world would look like and what are some of the scenarios that you can think of um that could be built on near that can only be possible through being I AI being on top of blockchain rather than the centralized ones so I mean I think honestly right now you can do maybe basic payments in web too right maybe there's tribe but you cannot do things like hey you know let's schedule a massive conference like and there's agents effectively going and executing different parts of this coming to a financial commitment between each other where you know maybe there's an agent run by aggm and hashed agent is talking to it and figuring out how to you know organize uh the venue and doing this right like all of those things really require effectively way faster moving uh money way faster moving agreement right imagine then okay now lawyers need to get involved now billing needs to be done now invoicing like it it's just going to kill all of the like speed and flexibility that this AI offering and so to me it's really about this velocity and and kind of ability to coordinate and then on the other side is opening up these Global markets again most of the thing most of the things we experience in life is some form of a market but it's usually very local it's very like you know you're getting a taxi it's a very local market even with some of the apps like uber and you can imagine kind of all of this being open Global Market where anybody can join and there is you know obviously reputation and uh kind of Economics around this and so a lot of the things I think really blockchain enables but even kind of what we're talking about the underlying infrastructure if you want a permissionless and you you want kind of monetizable Open Source blockchain is the only thing that can offer you this at the fundamental level right you cannot stripe pay into you know somebody else running to in a private capacity you know inference of a model and so kind of across the stack right at every level the velocity and the kind of programmability of finances of commitments is what blockchain enables and you know the crypto identity is kind of the root of this that you can take anywhere yeah my main takeaway in Abu Dhabi Finance week has been actually you know coordination and tolerance you know the fact that this country has been able to tolerate many different backgrounds and different initiative around business and coordinate them to work in this new country for most of us very similar to how you know open source AI has been approaching the world to coordinate within the large incentive system um I want to take a time to thank you everyone for joining us with uh founder of near protocol Ilia and Ilia thank you and good to see you here thank you [Music]