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Before co-founding NEAR Protocol, Illia Polosukhin was on the eight-person Google Brain team that wrote the transformer paper — the architecture behind every large language model running today.
He never mentioned it. When Kain Warwick found out two weeks ago, via a crypto AI chatbot, his reaction was: you have to be kidding me.
That backstory sets the tone for a conversation that moves from how transformers actually came together, to why confidentiality is what unlocks on-chain commerce for real businesses, and what NEAR is doing to keep criminals off its network without becoming a surveillance layer.
The hosts also get into the Ethereum Foundation’s identity crisis, why Illia thinks decentralization is a tool and not a goal, and what the economy looks like when AI handles execution and blockchain handles coordination.
Hosts:
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- Kain Warwick – Founder of Infinex and Synthetix
- Taylor Monahan – Security Expert
- Luca Netz – CEO of Pudgy Penguins
Guest:
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- Illia Polosukhin – Co-Founder, NEAR Protocol
