{"id":"7NAZ_0VNHUE","title":"The Digital Commonwealth: Mansion House Summit Series 2024 w Chris Donovan from NEAR Foundation","description":"Join Chris Donovan, COO of the NEAR Foundation, as he provides an thoughtful update on the NEAR ecosystem and its focus on self-sovereignty and AI integration. \n\nIn this insightful talk at The Digital Commonwealth Mansion House Summit Series 2024, Chris discusses the evolution of the NEAR Protocol, its roots in AI, and the innovative solutions being developed to ensure user control over data, assets, and governance. \n\nLearn about the features of the NEAR blockchain, the vision for AI, Chain Abstraction,  and how NEAR is unifying AI x Web3 to create a more equitable digital future. Whether you're new to NEAR or a seasoned blockchain enthusiast, this talk is packed with valuable insights on the transformative potential of decentralized technology.\n\nTimestamps:\n\n00:00:09 - Introduction and excitement for the update\n00:00:13 - Focus on the NEAR ecosystem and self-sovereignty with AI\n00:00:18 - The importance of themes from the earlier panel\n00:00:29 - Introduction of Chris Donovan of the NEAR Foundation\n00:00:40 - Overview of the NEAR Foundation's mission and background\n00:01:17 - Context and origins of the NEAR project in AI\n00:03:00 - The concept of the open web and self-sovereignty\n00:04:50 - Challenges with current closed systems and the role of AI\n00:06:03 - The inflection point and importance of user control\n00:08:19 - Solution through blockchain and AI integration\n00:10:00 - NEAR's scalable and user-friendly blockchain ecosystem\n00:12:11 - Introduction to NEAR AI and its innovative projects\n00:14:09 - Call to action for collaboration in the NEAR Horizon incubator\n\n\nJoin NEAR's community:\nWebsite: https://near.org/\nNEAR AI: https://near.ai/\nTwitter:   / nearprotocol  \nBlog: https://near.org/blog/\nMedium:   / nearprotocol  \nGitHub: https://github.com/near \nDev Docs: https://docs.near.org/\n#NEAR #nearprotocol #NEARAI","channel_name":"NEAR Protocol","published_at":"2024-06-24T00:00:00.000Z","thumbnail_url":"https://img.youtube.com/vi/7NAZ_0VNHUE/hqdefault.jpg","transcript_text":"Very excited today, just to give you an update on the. NEAR ecosystem, and everything that we're focusing on and in particular to make the case for self sovereignty and use around AI. And it was great. You know, that earlier panel, definitely touched on a lot of themes that are very close to our heart. And I'm here with my colleague, and we were both nodding away throughout that entire panel, which is which is always, you know, great, great to see. But for those of you who don't know me, my name is Chris Donovan. I'm the CEO at the NEAR Foundation. I was previously the general counsel. So I describe myself as a corporate lawyer and in recovery, and I, I valued Robbie's, comment earlier about lawyers being saviors. I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe lawyers like that before, so. Thanks. Thanks, Robbie. That was a nice, nice pick me up this morning. And for those of you who don't know the NEAR foundation, we are a regulated, Swiss nonprofit. And our mandate is to look after the, the ongoing growth and development of the. NEAR protocol, which is a sharded layer one blockchain and the ecosystem that the large, vibrant ecosystem, that is, that is built around it. So to start with, what I usually do is just give a little bit of context to the to the NEAR project in general. Because I think it's helpful particularly to, to, to kind of rationalize what we're working on right now. And so actually NEAR started out it's live, not as a blockchain project, but actually as an AI project. Right. And it was it was co-founded by Illia Polosukhin You can and Alex Skidanov And Illia in particular is hugely influential in the world of AI. Right. He is one of the coauthors of the paper Attention is All You Need. And that paper pioneered Transformers, which is the technology that powers all of these amazing large language models at the moment. And while Illia and Alex were working on this, I saw it up NEAR AI. They were working with researchers and contributors all over the world, and they were trying to get large amounts of data labeled and categorized to feed into these models. And they ran into a problem, which was, how do we reimburse and pay these people for their work at scale? Right. Because these people are distributed all over the world, lots of different countries, lots of different payment rails. And they thought to themselves, well, that seems like a use case that blockchain could solve for. Right? It's it's a globally distributed payment network, at least in some of its iterations. Right. But at that time, this is back in 2018. They surveyed the market and they couldn't actually find a piece of blockchain infrastructure that serve their needs that was truly scalable and actually cheap to use at scale. And so being the kind of superstar engineers that they are, they thought to themselves, well, we'll just build our own blockchain. And that's how Mia came about. So the unifying vision for veneer has always been, what we call the open web. Right. And that is, an internet, an online environment where all users control their data, they control their assets, and they control power of governance over the platforms and the services that they use. And really, when we think about the open web, we're thinking about and we're talking about self sovereignty, and we've heard that word used a lot, but really it's about fundamentally shifting the power dynamic. Right now, power is very much embedded with and in some cases or some people might say irrevocably captured by these very large closed corporations. Right. And these corporations have gotten very good at their business models, and their business models are all about optimizing for profit and their closest analog that they've discovered for maximizing that, that profit output is attention, right. And they don't care about anything else. That is just the nature of the incentive model. And that isn't necessarily meant to be a kind of disparaging or derogatory comment. There's not necessarily mal intent behind it. It's just the nature of that incentive structure means that inevitably they try and capture more attention to generate more profit. They get even better at capturing our attention. Until actually now, these systems, they touch every aspect of our lives. Everything that we do is touched by these closed systems. And at the moment that distribution of power and the distribution of value and not incentives loop leads to a whole bunch of very negative consequences, right? It leads to things like wealth inequality. It leads to things like, you know, the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation, because these things, they capture attention and generate profit, but they're not necessarily good for the world. They're not necessarily good for the users to be to be digesting. Right. And that was a comment on the panel earlier about thinking through the intent for what these systems are actually designed to be doing. And at the moment, that designed to capture attention and that attention capture erodes our self sovereignty. Right. We start, you know, we start getting these hunches to buy new products we haven't thought about before because we've subconsciously been, you know, getting these adverts. We, you know, we have these spooky moments where we're talking about something with our with our partners at home, and all of a sudden an ad pops up on Instagram or Facebook and people are like, wow, that's that's spooky, right? And they're very good at it now. They're amazing at they have teams of, you know, neuroscientists and psychologists programing to make these things as powerful and as addictive as possible. And we think that, you know, that that paradigm is flawed. And if you introduce AI into that paradigm, all you're going to do is amplify enormously all of these issues, all of these problems. And because I, as we've just been hearing about, is such a transformative, enormously impactful technology, our belief is that it is fundamentally important to ensure that that technology is put into the hands of users, right? It's controlled and owned and operated in a self-sovereign way. And we actually think that this moment is enormously important. We're at an inflection point, and I don't want to be a a kind of doomsayer here. Right. And we have heard about some of the potential dangers of AI, but I actually think the biggest danger is irrevocably entrenching this closed paradigm, right? Where we end up having a few mega-corporations that control everything that we do. And right now, I don't know about you guys, but, you know, I don't want Sam to be telling me how to think about the world. What things I like to do, who I want to meet and fall in love with. That's too much power for one person. It's too much power for even a small group of individuals. But more importantly, individuals should have that self-sovereign ability to decide the types of information that they want to consume. For example, the types of models they want to use. They should also have an ability to interrogate those models they should understand. Well, if my information is in one of these data sets that is generating billions of dollars of revenue for open AI, where's my share of that? My data is valuable. I've given it to you. I should get something in return. And right now the system is just not at all set up for that. And it leads to some very negative outcomes. And our view is the solution to that very substantial problem is all about the effective unification of blockchain technology and AI. And I think, you know, the key features of blockchain technology more than anything else are, first of all, that they can it can actually guarantee self sovereignty, right? It's not. People often describe it as trust minimized. And that's actually not what it is. It's trust guaranteed. You do not need to trust anybody else in the network to be able to transact with them. It's enormously powerful. And a consequence of that self sovereignty and the fact that these networks are permissionless and autonomous and so anyone anywhere can use them. Right? And also, they always operate in the same way for everyone. They know. There's no one kind of changing the rules. There's no ins and outs, first class citizens versus second citizens. Everyone is treated in the same way by this technology. So it then creates, you know, these, enormous potential for supporting open economies and most importantly, a solution, an economic solution for supporting open systems. Because right now, in a way, a lot of these AI, you know, projects, again, they're not they're not sitting there trying to, you know, easily take over the entire world, but they don't have an an effective alternative to raising all of the capital and funding the enormous expenditure that is needed to develop these AI models. Right. It's it's billions and billions of dollars worth of cost, like the GPUs, the compute everything is so expensive and right now. And OpenAI even itself tried this. They started out being open, open source, everything where a public good. And, you know, a few years into that journey, they realized if they want to raise enough money to be able to to compete and do this effectively, they needed to resort to the closed model. They got a bunch of stakeholders, and they are now primarily motivated by profit. And we think that's an enormous problem. So thinking about the solution, then running this unification of blockchain and blockchain and AI. Pardon me. You know, we think that creates the possibility for an online environment, an internet and broadly a world where users well-being and also that economic success can be optimized for instead of attention. Right. And if we think about, first of all, from our perspective in the NEAR ecosystem, right, we have both of those components which we're very proud of. But we have the name protocol, which is a layer one blockchain ecosystem. It's very scalable. It's very cheap to use. And we're very proud of the fact that we are home to some of the largest consumer based Web3 applications in the world, right? We have about 2 million daily active users, which is more than any other blockchain ecosystem. But I think, most excitingly of all, we've recently released some cool contributors in the ecosystem. I should say I've recently released this technology called chain signatures. Right. And what that effectively enables is from your NEAR accounts. So from one place, one user interface, you can facilitate and transact all of your digital asset interactions, regardless of which ecosystem, which canonical blockchain doesn't matter. And if any of you are particularly familiar with in fact, how many of you hold digital assets? How many of you have a, you know, self hosted method of holding those digital assets? So less right. So, you know, the old adage is not your keys, not your coins. But if any of you who have these self-hosted wallets right have experienced that, the absolute agony and pain of running down seed phrases for 20 different wallet providers, 20 different, canonical blockchain ecosystems bridging I mean, bridging, you know, don't get me start. It's awful. And it's also an enormous security risk. Right. So what change signatures does is it solves for that. So actually from your account you can transact on any blockchain you like. You can manage your Bitcoin. You can manage your Ethereum your Polkadot no bridging, no security risks. And most importantly of all good user experience, right? A user experience that mimics the current web2 user experience that's become so prevalent. But in people, when you talk to them and you say, don't you think self sovereignty is important? You know, don't you think that these values, you know, as something that you should be fighting for, that you that should inform how you're making your choices about what technology you use. And they go, well, yeah, definitely. But like I also want my Amazon to arrive tomorrow. I want I want my delivery to arrive in five minutes. So I don't care about it as much as that. And so we've realized that values aren't enough to bring people into this new paradigm. You have to meet some of these web2 organizations and beat them at their own game in the way that you do. That is, with the user experience equivalent user expense. You make it easy for them to take that step. So I think that's one piece of the puzzle that's it's making blockchain technology easily adoptable, you know, for anyone. Right. And then the second piece as I mentioned is this User-Owned AI component. Now we've recently in the last sort of 6 to 9 months or so, we've been focusing increasingly on AI. Right. And actually Ilia and Alex have kind of now gone full circle. And we launched recently a new, AI R&D lab, coordinated AI. And they are focusing on generating some really amazing, technology and functionality and products that that runs on our permissionless autonomous ecosystem in an open way. Right. And one of these really cool, products is what we call AI developer. And actually, this is, this is a model which is able from natural language to create end to end functioning Web3 applications, including user interfaces from scratch. So that means that non-technical people can literally in the space of a few minutes, they can create a fully functioning Web3 application. Right? And at the moment, one of the biggest barriers to entry for Web3 is that the developer pool is very small and it's very technical to develop. So we think this is an enormous opportunity to try and unify these two worlds together. And the last thing that I'll say is, in addition to this NEAR AI kind of R&D research lab, we're also building more broadly the fundamental components for a user. Right. And AI ecosystem. Right. And when I say use around AI, I mean these are models which are run on user devices, right? They are fully segregated and private. So users can decide when and where and how they share their information. They're hyper personalized as well. To you, specifically the your interests and your desires. You're not being aggregated and nudged and pushed from lots of different directions. You control your own digital fate and you control your own digital dignity. Right? And for that to be the case, that needs to be open source, permissionless and autonomous resources for all of these types of applications to function. This is everything from, you know, databases and data sets to, you know, compute and inference to, experiences and, and energetic kind of front ends and, and all the rest of it. Right. And so right now, and if anyone here is, is building something that kind of fits the bill, please come and see me afterwards. We're running, an incubation cohort called NEAR Horizon (HZN) with a bunch of projects, you know, really incredible, Web3 AI projects, building these different kind of pieces of infrastructure. And we're fitting them all together, you know, in a, in a kind of patchwork to create this fertile, almost primordial soup for this open, you know, User-Owned AI to emerge. And we think that if you believe that the values that I've been talking about, openness and self sovereignty are important, this is the you know, this is the way to try and guarantee that it happens. It's still going to be really hard. And we might not succeed. I vehemently hope that we do, but I think we have to try. And if we don't, then I think it's inevitable that this closed paradigm will be victorious. And I think the consequences, they might not feel material now, but they absolutely will be in the future. So I think we have to stay optimistic. We have to stay hopeful, and we have to all work together. Thank you very much for listening. And, looking forward to a coffee break. I think.","transcript_synced_at":"2026-11-03T05:47:28.801Z","segments":[{"start_seconds":9,"text":"Very excited today, just to give you an update on the.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=9s"},{"start_seconds":13,"text":"NEAR ecosystem, and everything that we're focusing on and in particular to make the case for self sovereignty and use around AI.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=13s"},{"start_seconds":23,"text":"And it was great.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=23s"},{"start_seconds":24,"text":"You know, that earlier panel, definitely touched on a lot of themes that are very close to our heart.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=24s"},{"start_seconds":29,"text":"And I'm here with my colleague, and we were both nodding away throughout that entire panel, which is which is always, you know, great, great to see. But for those of you who don't know me, my name is Chris Donovan.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=29s"},{"start_seconds":37,"text":"I'm the CEO at the NEAR Foundation. I was previously the general counsel.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=37s"},{"start_seconds":42,"text":"So I describe myself as a corporate lawyer and in recovery, and I, I valued Robbie's, comment earlier about lawyers being saviors.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=42s"},{"start_seconds":52,"text":"I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe lawyers like that before, so. Thanks. Thanks, Robbie. That was a nice, nice pick me up this morning.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=52s"},{"start_seconds":58,"text":"And for those of you who don't know the NEAR foundation, we are a regulated, Swiss nonprofit. And our mandate is to look after the, the ongoing growth and development of the.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=58s"},{"start_seconds":69,"text":"NEAR protocol, which is a sharded layer one blockchain and the ecosystem that the large, vibrant ecosystem, that is, that is built around it.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=69s"},{"start_seconds":77,"text":"So to start with, what I usually do is just give a little bit of context to the to the NEAR project in general.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=77s"},{"start_seconds":84,"text":"Because I think it's helpful particularly to, to, to kind of rationalize what we're working on right now.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=84s"},{"start_seconds":90,"text":"And so actually NEAR started out it's live, not as a blockchain project, but actually as an AI project. Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=90s"},{"start_seconds":95,"text":"And it was it was co-founded by Illia Polosukhin You can and Alex Skidanov And Illia in particular is hugely influential in the world of AI.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=95s"},{"start_seconds":103,"text":"Right. He is one of the coauthors of the paper Attention is All You Need.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=103s"},{"start_seconds":107,"text":"And that paper pioneered Transformers, which is the technology that powers all of these amazing large language models at the moment.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=107s"},{"start_seconds":115,"text":"And while Illia and Alex were working on this, I saw it up NEAR AI.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=115s"},{"start_seconds":119,"text":"They were working with researchers and contributors all over the world, and they were trying to get large amounts of data labeled and categorized to feed into these models.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=119s"},{"start_seconds":128,"text":"And they ran into a problem, which was, how do we reimburse and pay these people for their work at scale? Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=128s"},{"start_seconds":134,"text":"Because these people are distributed all over the world, lots of different countries, lots of different payment rails.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=134s"},{"start_seconds":139,"text":"And they thought to themselves, well, that seems like a use case that blockchain could solve for. Right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=139s"},{"start_seconds":144,"text":"It's it's a globally distributed payment network, at least in some of its iterations. Right. But at that time, this is back in 2018.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=144s"},{"start_seconds":152,"text":"They surveyed the market and they couldn't actually find a piece of blockchain infrastructure that serve their needs that was truly scalable and actually cheap to use at scale.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=152s"},{"start_seconds":164,"text":"And so being the kind of superstar engineers that they are, they thought to themselves, well, we'll just build our own blockchain.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=164s"},{"start_seconds":169,"text":"And that's how Mia came about. So the unifying vision for veneer has always been, what we call the open web.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=169s"},{"start_seconds":180,"text":"Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=180s"},{"start_seconds":180,"text":"And that is, an internet, an online environment where all users control their data, they control their assets, and they control power of governance over the platforms and the services that they use.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=180s"},{"start_seconds":194,"text":"And really, when we think about the open web, we're thinking about and we're talking about self sovereignty, and we've heard that word used a lot, but really it's about fundamentally shifting the power dynamic.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=194s"},{"start_seconds":206,"text":"Right now, power is very much embedded with and in some cases or some people might say irrevocably captured by these very large closed corporations.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=206s"},{"start_seconds":218,"text":"Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=218s"},{"start_seconds":219,"text":"And these corporations have gotten very good at their business models, and their business models are all about optimizing for profit","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=219s"},{"start_seconds":227,"text":"and their closest analog that they've discovered for maximizing that, that profit output is attention, right. And they don't care about anything else.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=227s"},{"start_seconds":236,"text":"That is just the nature of the incentive model.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=236s"},{"start_seconds":238,"text":"And that isn't necessarily meant to be a kind of disparaging or derogatory comment. There's not necessarily mal intent behind it.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=238s"},{"start_seconds":244,"text":"It's just the nature of that incentive structure means that inevitably they try and capture more attention to generate more profit. They get even better at capturing our attention.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=244s"},{"start_seconds":253,"text":"Until actually now, these systems, they touch every aspect of our lives. Everything that we do is touched by these closed systems.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=253s"},{"start_seconds":261,"text":"And at the moment that distribution of power and the distribution of value and not incentives loop leads to a whole bunch of very negative consequences, right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=261s"},{"start_seconds":270,"text":"It leads to things like wealth inequality. It leads to things like, you know, the prevalence of misinformation","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=270s"},{"start_seconds":277,"text":"and disinformation, because these things, they capture attention and generate profit, but they're not necessarily good for the world. They're not necessarily good for the users to be to be digesting. Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=277s"},{"start_seconds":286,"text":"And that was a comment on the panel earlier about thinking through the intent for what these systems are actually designed to be doing.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=286s"},{"start_seconds":294,"text":"And at the moment, that designed to capture attention and that attention capture erodes our self sovereignty. Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=294s"},{"start_seconds":300,"text":"We start, you know, we start getting these hunches to buy new products we haven't thought about before because we've subconsciously been, you know, getting these adverts.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=300s"},{"start_seconds":308,"text":"We, you know, we have these spooky moments where we're talking about something with our with our partners at home, and all of a sudden an ad pops up on Instagram or Facebook and people are like, wow, that's that's spooky, right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=308s"},{"start_seconds":317,"text":"And they're very good at it now.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=317s"},{"start_seconds":318,"text":"They're amazing at they have teams of, you know, neuroscientists and psychologists programing to make these things as powerful and as addictive as possible.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=318s"},{"start_seconds":326,"text":"And we think that, you know, that that paradigm is flawed.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=326s"},{"start_seconds":331,"text":"And if you introduce AI into that paradigm, all you're going to do is amplify enormously all of these issues, all of these problems.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=331s"},{"start_seconds":340,"text":"And because I, as we've just been hearing about, is such a transformative, enormously impactful technology, our belief is that it is fundamentally important to ensure that that technology is put into the hands of users, right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=340s"},{"start_seconds":354,"text":"It's controlled and owned and operated in a self-sovereign way. And we actually think that this moment is enormously important.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=354s"},{"start_seconds":363,"text":"We're at an inflection point, and I don't want to be a a kind of doomsayer here. Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=363s"},{"start_seconds":368,"text":"And we have heard about some of the potential dangers of AI, but I actually think the biggest danger is irrevocably entrenching this closed paradigm, right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=368s"},{"start_seconds":378,"text":"Where we end up having a few mega-corporations that control everything that we do.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=378s"},{"start_seconds":383,"text":"And right now, I don't know about you guys, but, you know, I don't want Sam to be telling me how to think about the world. What things I like to do, who I want to meet and fall in love with.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=383s"},{"start_seconds":392,"text":"That's too much power for one person. It's too much power for even a small group of individuals.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=392s"},{"start_seconds":396,"text":"But more importantly, individuals should have that self-sovereign ability to decide the types of information that they want to consume. For example, the types of models they want to use.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=396s"},{"start_seconds":405,"text":"They should also have an ability to interrogate those models they should understand.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=405s"},{"start_seconds":409,"text":"Well, if my information is in one of these data sets that is generating billions of dollars of revenue for open AI, where's my share of that?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=409s"},{"start_seconds":417,"text":"My data is valuable. I've given it to you. I should get something in return. And right now the system is just not at all set up for that.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=417s"},{"start_seconds":424,"text":"And it leads to some very negative outcomes.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=424s"},{"start_seconds":428,"text":"And our view is the solution to that very substantial problem is all about the effective unification of blockchain technology and AI.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=428s"},{"start_seconds":439,"text":"And I think, you know, the key features of blockchain technology more than anything else are, first of all, that they can it can actually guarantee self sovereignty, right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=439s"},{"start_seconds":447,"text":"It's not. People often describe it as trust minimized. And that's actually not what it is. It's trust guaranteed.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=447s"},{"start_seconds":453,"text":"You do not need to trust anybody else in the network to be able to transact with them. It's enormously powerful.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=453s"},{"start_seconds":460,"text":"And a consequence of that self sovereignty and the fact that these networks are permissionless and autonomous and so anyone anywhere can use them. Right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=460s"},{"start_seconds":468,"text":"And also, they always operate in the same way for everyone. They know. There's no one kind of changing the rules. There's no ins and outs, first class citizens versus second citizens.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=468s"},{"start_seconds":477,"text":"Everyone is treated in the same way by this technology.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=477s"},{"start_seconds":480,"text":"So it then creates, you know, these, enormous potential for supporting open economies","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=480s"},{"start_seconds":490,"text":"and most importantly, a solution, an economic solution for supporting open systems.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=490s"},{"start_seconds":497,"text":"Because right now, in a way, a lot of these AI, you know, projects, again, they're not they're not sitting there trying to, you know, easily take over the entire world,","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=497s"},{"start_seconds":506,"text":"but they don't have an an effective alternative to raising all of the capital and funding the enormous expenditure that is needed to develop these AI models.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=506s"},{"start_seconds":516,"text":"Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=516s"},{"start_seconds":516,"text":"It's it's billions and billions of dollars worth of cost, like the GPUs, the compute everything is so expensive and right now. And OpenAI even itself tried this.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=516s"},{"start_seconds":525,"text":"They started out being open, open source, everything where a public good.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=525s"},{"start_seconds":528,"text":"And, you know, a few years into that journey, they realized if they want to raise enough money to be able to to compete and do this effectively, they needed to resort to the closed model.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=528s"},{"start_seconds":537,"text":"They got a bunch of stakeholders, and they are now primarily motivated by profit. And we think that's an enormous problem.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=537s"},{"start_seconds":544,"text":"So thinking about the solution, then running this unification of blockchain and blockchain and AI.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=544s"},{"start_seconds":553,"text":"Pardon me.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=553s"},{"start_seconds":554,"text":"You know, we think that creates the possibility for an online environment, an internet and broadly a world where users well-being and also that economic success can be optimized for instead of attention.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=554s"},{"start_seconds":567,"text":"Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=567s"},{"start_seconds":568,"text":"And if we think about, first of all, from our perspective in the NEAR ecosystem, right, we have both of those components which we're very proud of.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=568s"},{"start_seconds":575,"text":"But we have the name protocol, which is a layer one blockchain ecosystem. It's very scalable. It's very cheap to use.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=575s"},{"start_seconds":583,"text":"And we're very proud of the fact that we are home to some of the largest consumer based Web3 applications in the world, right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=583s"},{"start_seconds":589,"text":"We have about 2 million daily active users, which is more than any other blockchain ecosystem.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=589s"},{"start_seconds":594,"text":"But I think, most excitingly of all, we've recently released some cool contributors in the ecosystem. I should say I've recently released this technology called chain signatures.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=594s"},{"start_seconds":604,"text":"Right. And what that effectively enables is from your NEAR accounts.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=604s"},{"start_seconds":607,"text":"So from one place, one user interface, you can facilitate and transact all of your digital asset interactions, regardless of which ecosystem, which canonical blockchain doesn't matter.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=607s"},{"start_seconds":618,"text":"And if any of you are particularly familiar with in fact, how many of you hold digital assets?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=618s"},{"start_seconds":625,"text":"How many of you have a, you know, self hosted method of holding those digital assets? So less right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=625s"},{"start_seconds":633,"text":"So, you know, the old adage is not your keys, not your coins.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=633s"},{"start_seconds":636,"text":"But if any of you who have these self-hosted wallets right have experienced that, the absolute agony and pain of running down seed phrases","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=636s"},{"start_seconds":643,"text":"for 20 different wallet providers, 20 different, canonical blockchain ecosystems bridging I mean, bridging, you know, don't get me start. It's awful.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=643s"},{"start_seconds":650,"text":"And it's also an enormous security risk. Right. So what change signatures does is it solves for that.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=650s"},{"start_seconds":657,"text":"So actually from your account you can transact on any blockchain you like. You can manage your Bitcoin. You can manage your Ethereum your Polkadot no bridging, no security risks.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=657s"},{"start_seconds":666,"text":"And most importantly of all good user experience, right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=666s"},{"start_seconds":670,"text":"A user experience that mimics the current web2 user experience that's become so prevalent.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=670s"},{"start_seconds":676,"text":"But in people, when you talk to them and you say, don't you think self sovereignty is important?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=676s"},{"start_seconds":681,"text":"You know, don't you think that these values, you know, as something that you should be fighting for, that you that should inform how you're making your choices about what technology you use. And they go, well, yeah, definitely.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=681s"},{"start_seconds":691,"text":"But like I also want my Amazon to arrive tomorrow. I want I want my delivery to arrive in five minutes. So I don't care about it as much as that.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=691s"},{"start_seconds":699,"text":"And so we've realized that values aren't enough to bring people into this new paradigm.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=699s"},{"start_seconds":704,"text":"You have to meet some of these web2 organizations and beat them at their own game in the way that you do. That is, with the user experience equivalent user expense.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=704s"},{"start_seconds":713,"text":"You make it easy for them to take that step.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=713s"},{"start_seconds":716,"text":"So I think that's one piece of the puzzle that's it's making blockchain technology easily adoptable, you know, for anyone. Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=716s"},{"start_seconds":723,"text":"And then the second piece as I mentioned is this User-Owned AI component.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=723s"},{"start_seconds":727,"text":"Now we've recently in the last sort of 6 to 9 months or so, we've been focusing increasingly on AI. Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=727s"},{"start_seconds":735,"text":"And actually Ilia and Alex have kind of now gone full circle. And we launched recently a new, AI R&D lab, coordinated AI.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=735s"},{"start_seconds":744,"text":"And they are focusing on generating some really amazing, technology and functionality and products that that runs on our permissionless autonomous ecosystem in an open way.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=744s"},{"start_seconds":753,"text":"Right. And one of these really cool, products is what we call AI developer.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=753s"},{"start_seconds":758,"text":"And actually, this is, this is a model which is able from natural language to create end to end functioning Web3 applications, including user interfaces from scratch.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=758s"},{"start_seconds":769,"text":"So that means that non-technical people can literally in the space of a few minutes, they can create a fully functioning Web3 application. Right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=769s"},{"start_seconds":777,"text":"And at the moment, one of the biggest barriers to entry for Web3 is that the developer pool is very small and it's very technical to develop.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=777s"},{"start_seconds":784,"text":"So we think this is an enormous opportunity to try and unify these two worlds together.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=784s"},{"start_seconds":789,"text":"And the last thing that I'll say is, in addition to this NEAR AI kind of R&D research lab, we're also building more broadly the fundamental components for a user.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=789s"},{"start_seconds":800,"text":"Right. And AI ecosystem. Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=800s"},{"start_seconds":802,"text":"And when I say use around AI, I mean these are models which are run on user devices, right? They are fully segregated and private.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=802s"},{"start_seconds":810,"text":"So users can decide when and where and how they share their information. They're hyper personalized as well. To you, specifically the your interests and your desires.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=810s"},{"start_seconds":819,"text":"You're not being aggregated and nudged and pushed from lots of different directions. You control your own digital fate and you control your own digital dignity.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=819s"},{"start_seconds":828,"text":"Right?","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=828s"},{"start_seconds":829,"text":"And for that to be the case, that needs to be open source, permissionless and autonomous resources for all of these types of applications to function.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=829s"},{"start_seconds":838,"text":"This is everything from, you know, databases and data sets to, you know, compute and inference to, experiences and, and energetic kind of front ends and, and all the rest of it.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=838s"},{"start_seconds":849,"text":"Right.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=849s"},{"start_seconds":849,"text":"And so right now, and if anyone here is, is building something that kind of fits the bill, please come and see me afterwards.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=849s"},{"start_seconds":857,"text":"We're running, an incubation cohort called NEAR Horizon (HZN) with a bunch of projects, you know, really incredible, Web3 AI projects, building these different kind of pieces of infrastructure.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=857s"},{"start_seconds":869,"text":"And we're fitting them all together, you know, in a, in a kind of patchwork to create this fertile, almost primordial soup for this open, you know, User-Owned AI to emerge.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=869s"},{"start_seconds":881,"text":"And we think that if you believe that the values that I've been talking about, openness and self sovereignty are important, this is the you know, this is the way to try and guarantee that it happens.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=881s"},{"start_seconds":894,"text":"It's still going to be really hard. And we might not succeed. I vehemently hope that we do, but I think we have to try.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=894s"},{"start_seconds":902,"text":"And if we don't, then I think it's inevitable that this closed paradigm will be victorious.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=902s"},{"start_seconds":907,"text":"And I think the consequences, they might not feel material now, but they absolutely will be in the future. So I think we have to stay optimistic.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=907s"},{"start_seconds":914,"text":"We have to stay hopeful, and we have to all work together. Thank you very much for listening. And, looking forward to a coffee break. I think.","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE&t=914s"}],"youtube_url":"https://youtube.com/watch?v=7NAZ_0VNHUE","url":"https://near-pedia.xyz/videos/7NAZ_0VNHUE"}