There are many in the Web3 space who have only recently jumped into AI. Illia Polosukhin isn’t one of them. Long before he co-founded the decentralized app blockchain protocol NEAR, Polosukhin worked at Google as an AI researcher and co-wrote the seminal 2017 paper “ Attention is All you Need ,” which is widely credited as pioneering the “transformer” technology that powers popular large language model (LLMs) AI apps such as ChatGPT. His AI credentials are impeccable.

“AI is a really powerful force,” Polosukhin told me in 2023, “but what we don't want is it to be controlled and biased by a single company.” So now Polosukhin is marrying his original love (AI) with NEAR’s mission of decentralization, working to create an entire ecosystem for decentralized AI, from compute to training to agents.

At NEAR’s recent [Redacted] conference in Bangkok, there were literal signs everywhere showing just how seriously Polosukhin is taking this: “AI is NEAR.”

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here .