Software Engineering Daily Building Open Infrastructure for AI with Illia Polosukhin
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Jul 17, 2025 
Illia Polosukhin, a veteran AI researcher and co-author of the Transformer paper, discusses his journey toward open-source AI at NEAR AI. He delves into the proliferation of user-owned AI and the ethical dimensions of combining AI with blockchain technology. Polosukhin highlights the importance of decentralized marketplaces, trusted execution environments, and secure GPU inference for maintaining privacy. He also critiques conventional AI hosting models, advocating for community-driven solutions to enhance transparency and security in AI infrastructure.
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Blockchain’s Core Use Cases and AI Role
- Illia groups blockchain use cases into four: global identity, payments, marketplaces, and coordination.
- He argues that blockchain's biggest failure is coordination due to human messiness, but AI can help solve this by effectively managing scale and complexity.
Developers Building AI Agents
- Developers can upload Docker containers as AI agents to run on a private inference system using secure enclaves.
- They can also build blockchain smart contracts that interact with agents for verifiable AI-executed logic.
Balancing Privacy and Debugging
- Illia advises balancing privacy and observability by setting thresholds to get debugging info without exposing user data.
- They are building analytics tooling to provide developers privacy-respecting logs and performance metrics for their agents.
