# Digital Self-Sovereignty in the Age of AI | Illia Polosukhin - NEAR Foundation

- Speakers: [Illia Polosukhin](https://streameth.org/speakers/illia-polosukhin)
- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2024-10-09
- Duration: 15:36
- Topics: blockchain, web3, ethereum, Entertainment
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-m5jJkvCG338
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5jJkvCG338

## Description

With the rise of generative AI and the changing regulations and economics around big tech, we are approaching a point of no return. Illia Polosukhin, co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," the paper that launched transformers, as well as co-founder of NEAR Protocol, offers a challenge for how AI and Web3 can work together to create a new digital paradigm for self-sovereignty.

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## Transcript

thank you thank you very much great to be here uh this is I've been coming to East Denver since 2019 so it's been really exciting to see this event growing so I'm really excited to be here and uh if you missed uh I've before kind of my blockchain uh journey I actually was for about 10 years um machine learning researcher and developer I worked at Google research and and the team of us have developed a technology called Transformers and for those who are not familiar it is what powers most of the advancements right now in uh in AI now near actually started as AI startup we were teaching machines to code we're trying to change how you interact with Computing and we had a challenge ourselves that as we were uh interacting with different uh participants to curate more data and do crowdsourcing we needed to pay them uh and they were everywhere in around the world and you would think that crypto is that global payment Network that uh can enable this back in 2018 it was not the case and this is when we really focused on building out near protocol and a blockchain that can actually power um Global usage of cryptocurrency as well as a lot of other use cases now the vision we set out to do is really to build self- sovereignty the way we Define this is that we want all people to have control of their assets data and power of governance and these are important uh pieces to understand right we talk a lot about self soverignty uh around kind of being able to control your own assets but it spans beyond that and it's especially important you know I grew up in Ukraine and you know kind of the failure of banks the hyper inflation is something that I'm I grew up with uh I wouldn't trust you know many banks in Ukraine with a lot of money for sure and uh for you know I've seen kind of inflation of initially coupons and now griev as well uh that continuesly to happen but beyond that it's also what we have now with data uh and I'll talk about more of this and so the I think the important part this is not just developing country problem this is really a global problem that we have that we starting to lose our control over our lives uh and kind of this is what the important part of power of governance is so there are two major problems converging right now there is one that is really about the incentives and this is not a new problem the two the kind of the beginning of Bitcoin with you know uh Global financial crisis was Banks who leveraged and leveraged their position to really create new financial instruments without any transparency and then kind of to generate more profit and led to a financial crisis similarly we have now with tech companies who are able to leverage their position their access their distribution to put High fees in app store to really kind of uh have pretty much promote products and even manipulate the way you are P perceiving products through advertisement and these are again with the age of AI now accelerating because even before uh you know machine learning been used for a long time in advertisement now you're able to have this advertisement being injected directly into the answer that you asking chat GPT or gemini or any other chatbot and you wouldn't even know if it was coming from a statistical model based on General data or it has been affected by an ad auction and price and kind of sold for specific spefically you to you know promote this product or this opinion or this idea and this is extremely dangerous and this is where we're starting to lose in many ways control of the reality because the reality is now framed by you know the media you consume the uh kind of products you're using and if they are controlled by single parties that have kind of their motivation is really driven by this incentives you know shareholder profits they all will be continuously trying to increase that value extraction uh and CH to change your opinion now again this is not a like uh isolated problem it affects everyone in the digital world and this is just news from last week this is like not even hard it took two minutes to pull you know all kinds of ways that right now the current system is trying to uh figure out how to deal with this right it's everything from you know open AI that was originally a nonprofit now making billions of dollars you have people who are you know suing Google because it has such a manipis control over advertisement you have you know approaches which are scaring people with Sora so you have all of the things happening right now and I would claim that companies don't do it on purpose right there's no like evil mastermind sitting there and and saying like hey we really need to manipulate people this is really the incentive problem the problem that as you incentivized to create more Revenue you incentivized to figure out how to extract more value and you will be continuously making this models to do that now this is really combined with you know all the other world kind of challenges we have right and again I'm from Ukraine I see a very uh clear problems with dictators who are controlling countries right being able to really change the world and perception of the population and such a way that they normalize the war and killing of people who are really their you know actually blood uh relatives and so we really need to actually address these challenges at a fundamental level and I would say that Regulators the approaches that are top down that come in from boardrooms or from uh kind of a small set of regulators trying to think how to improve the situation will not work for example the AI regulations right now the there is an executive order that came out of white house that makes no sense they are restricting Innovation by saying that if you have more than some number of parameters you're not able to do it unless you have like a team that will be ethically evaluating the models they have not defined any of the criteria for what is etical and what is you know safe for the models and what it means is they actually let making the big bigger companies being able to control that even more because they have the resources and fund to really set up the teams and Market them as you know really important part of the process whereas startups and innovators are not able to where is open source that is truly at the core of what we're doing is not able to do that and this is really kind of one of the most challenging thing and we see the same thing with regulations and crypto where like The Regulators don't understand the fact that using crypto is the way to regulate this we have the opportunity to leverage this technology to actually self-regulate and provide transparency and visibility to everyone and so we have this fork in the road right on one side we have a Black Mirror state where we have few companies that really control the way people perceive reality the way people buy products the way people you know consume content or we have a self- sovereign uh route which is really about each individual having the ability to do this each Community having their own right and way and you have a choice if you want to use you know centralized company you have that choice but you should be able to also switch to Alternative the alternative and startups should be able to innovate and create alternative products not require you know ton of licenses to just start building a model in Python notebook like that's that's a level of regulations right now that's happening and so it's really important for us to AI proof our systems AI is extremely powerful tool I'm really excited at what you know the progress we've seen and I'm excited to you know contribute and and see even more progress but we also need to understand that this is can be used to do all this bad things and we need our systems which right now rely on paperwork on unsecure connections on you know ability to look at the content you don't know where it came from to really leverage cryptography leverage blockchain leverage all of the Technologies we're building to a i proof it it's about decentralized and transparent digital systems that will allow ow to have incentives to be transparent and clear to everyone instead of right now you have opaque systems inside bigger companies and bigger Banks it's new collaboration structures that we can all come together to promote open source to develop new tooling to enable it to be used by everyone and if you are making money of it to contribute back in kind and finally it's about kind of scaling the markets and allowing anybody to participate in an open way uh without boundaries without you know trying to prove your background or where you came from or what's you know any other property but really being able to participate so we are kind of as near been always thinking about this and for us this all comes together as self- Sovereign operating system it's really something that as we kind of interact in with Computing we need a different way of doing this and now it builds up on traditional operating systems web to operating systems there's a huge component of private data and decentralized data data there's a huge component of user owned AI an ability for you as a user to have your AI That's on your side being able to kind of shield and decide what content and how it should be summarized that you define similarly you you have user owned AI that is Def works for community on behalf of community andwers that you have trustless infrastructure and you have experiences that are now more generated and less like by your own model and really provides to you uh as a service so the trustless infrastructure this is something we're building here right we here at this Denver a lot of us are building is infrastructure applications on top of it and it's all about s sovereignty you know that private key kind of cryptography that enables this but now we need to push forward to enable communities to govern this to enable to have uh really easy way to on board new users and this is one of the components why we've been focused on chain abstraction on enabling really a way for anyone to on board and use web 3 without thinking about the blockchain gas feeds Bridges lowlevel infrastructure ideally even wallets and uh other pieces if you don't need to and this is really how we bring the next wave of users they're not going to come because of the uh values per se they're going to come because it's easy to use it's new content it's new opportunity and they're able to do this as near we've been doing this uh since mayet and we are proudly a home for top consumer applications we have over 10 million monthly active users most of whom don't know they using blockchain they use it through different applications like kaai ching and sweatcoin play Amber and hot wallet to really interact with all of the web 3 without thinking about the kind of underlying details gas fees and other pieces of infrastructure that we all you know really working on now the other piece is user own dat AI I think this is extremely important because right now the alternative is companies centralized companies that fully control the model that are able to provide you an answer really fast potentially cheap but you have no idea what you're getting into right you have no idea what decisions went in into training data into how the systems proms were affected and how things actually uh been processed when you see them right there's no way to ensure that the thing you're getting has not dropped a specific piece of content from the training data which completely potentially avoids a whole spectrum of thinking because of whatever political view or any other view that that company had and remember this company is a jurisdiction in specific country and they need to comply by those regulations and so there's always will be limitations on what this models can do and so open- Source AI models are extremely important public data sets are extremely important figuring out how do we get models that run on your phone that owned by you that are on your side and are not trying to manipulate you is extremely important and this is where even further you can imagine Community models that are uniting values of any specific community and providing way to kind of interact with the knowledge and experiences of this community this is all important and this is all need to work on and so I'm inviting everyone here to think Beyond on just web 3 because we sometimes get really focused on the philosophy on the kind of values we establish here or sometimes as Chris uh was talking before we have you know a casino and it's it's entertaining there's a lot of fun you know you can go DJ and the coins on on Exchange but all of that is serves a purpose and it serves a purpose to create new Economic Opportunity create new really cool applications you cannot have in web 2 because it's New Market Market places it's new opportunities that are Global and enable new like new experiences for people and so it's easy to get caught up in in kind of our you know Market going up and everybody being excited about this but I encourage everyone to Think Through how do we get Beyond this how do we on board new wave of users what experiences can we build as well as how do we bring and solve problems that exist in real world right again open source AI is something that is being constantly pish right now because there's no incentives to actually build in open source and you have so much more incentives building in in uh big companies how do we leverage that how do we leverage technology to bring self- sovereignty to everyone make sure that intelligence as a tool is available to everyone at all times and is not controlled by single parties how do we make sure that we have and continue having access to all the content and at the same time are not spammed by generated content that is fake and be able to discern and have a reputation around content all this pieces we have the technology we have now infrastructure and so now it's really about building the applications so I thank everyone if you're interested to learn more about what I'm working on follow me on Twitter and self sovereignty is near so I'm hope we can all work on [Applause] this thank you Ilia that was great really important stuff really appreciate it uh we're going to go to a short break and