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Open Conversations: The Only Way Forward Is User-Owned AI (Illia Polosukhin)

Funding the CommonsThu, Oct 9, 2025, 12:00 AM

Speaker

Illia Polosukhin

2 talks

A conversation with Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol. As AI becomes more powerful, it’s increasingly controlled by a few centralized entities—raising serious questions about who benefits, who gets left out, and who holds the power. In a time when trust in institutions is eroding, Illia shares why user-owned AI could be the key to reclaiming agency, reshaping how we make decisions, and rebuilding systems that serve people, not platforms. He explains how NEAR is building the infrastructure for a future where AI acts as an advocate for individuals. Created at Funding the Commons at the Internet Archive, San Francisco, March 2025. Relevant Projects: NEAR: https://near.org Funding the Commons: https://www.fundingthecommons.io Thank You to Our Sponsors: Protocol Labs: https://www.protocol.ai/ NEAR Foundation: https://near.foundation/ Holonym: https://holonym.io/ Octant: https://octant.app/ Drips Network: https://drips.network/ Filecoin Foundation: https://fil.org/ OpenLedger: https://www.openledger.xyz/ Orange DAO: https://www.orangedao.xyz/ Regen Network: https://www.regen.network/

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]

Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.