Illia Polosukhin & Juan Benet: Building the Agentic Future | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

Sat, May 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

What happens when AI agents don't just assist humans but start forming their own entities, entering contracts, and building toward their own goals? Illia Polosukhin and Juan Benet think we're closer to that than most people realize. Illia, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," and Juan, founder of Protocol Labs, dig into the infrastructure needed for a world of autonomous AI coordination. The conversation turns on a deceptively simple problem: credit assignment. Every bottleneck in how we organize human effort, from machine learning to corporations to public goods funding, comes down to how well we can attribute contribution. Juan argues that cheap intelligence may finally let us solve this at scale, using Shapley value approximations to fairly distribute credit across AI agents working on shared goals. The first fully autonomous AI corporations may arrive within months. The question is whether we build the right foundations now or sleepwalk into it. Speakers: Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol), Juan Benet (Protocol Labs) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io