E749 - The Decentralized Future of Private AI with Illia Polosukhin

In this episode, Illia Polosukhin, a co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" paper and co-founder of Near AI, joins us to discuss his vision for building private, decentralized, and user-owned AI. Illia shares his unique journey from developing the Transformer architecture at Google to building the NEAR Protocol blockchain to solve global payment challenges, and now applying those decentralized principles back to AI. We explore how Near AI is creating a decentralized cloud that leverages confidential computing, secure enclaves, and the blockchain to protect both user data and proprietary model weights. Illia also shares his three-part...