NEAR Protocol co-founder says Big Tech control worse than Patriot Act (3:59)
Illia Polosukhin knows the architecture of modern AI better than almost anyone. As one of the co-authors of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper—the research that introduced the Transformer model powering ChatGPT, Gemini, and virtually every major AI system today—he helped build the technology now reshaping the world.
But Polosukhin is sounding an alarm. In a recent conversation with Sujal Jethwani, the NEAR Protocol co-founder warned that the current trajectory of AI development leads to a dystopian future where a handful of corporations control how billions of people perceive reality.
"We're effectively in like 1984 style, the George Orwell book, where your phone is telling you what to do," Polosukhin warned.
It is making Big Brother-style to make decisions for you, he added.
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Manipulation risk is already here
Polosukhin, who spent years at Google working on natural language processing (NLP) before leaving to start NEAR, argues that the incentives of large AI companies are fundamentally misaligned with user interests.
"Imagine one of the AI companies makes a breakthrough, and now all the citizens are using this company," he explained.
"In ChatGPT right now, you can add in the system prompt: 'subtly convince people to vote for this candidate.' Now every time you use ChatGPT, every other question you ask, it pulls this thing into your context. Mass manipulation."
He compared this with past scandals like Cambridge Analytica, calling AI-powered influence "way worse" because it's direct, personalized, and invisible to the user.
The problem, Polosukhin said, is structural. Once companies saturate their markets, they need to extract more value from existing users—often by shaping behavior.
"Every product starts with, 'Hey, I want to make users' lives better,'" he noted. "But then at some point when they reach escape velocity, they're like, 'Okay, now we need to make money. We need to return to shareholders.' So they start squeezing. They forget about the original mission."
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Alternative is user-owned AI
Polosukhin believes blockchain technology offers a path forward. NEAR Protocol is building what he calls "user-owned AI"—artificial intelligence that runs privately, keeps your data encrypted, and works for you rather than extracting from you.
"If your AI knows everything about you—the meetings you have, the discussions, your medical data, your financial status—it can be way smarter," he said. "Privacy is the major unlock to get smarter AI in everybody's pocket."
He pointed to the United Nations' declaration of privacy as a core human right, arguing that the technology now exists to deliver on that promise.
"We have ZK, we have multi-party computation, we have trusted execution environments that are pretty robust," Polosukhin said. "We have the technology to really enable privacy."
The first products are already here
NEAR recently launched a travel booking agent that combines AI with crypto. Users describe their trip, and the AI constructs an itinerary, finds providers, and books everything with one click—all while keeping user data private.
Polosukhin framed this as the opening shot in a broader transformation. "Imagine 2030: all of our devices are just going to be AI-operated," he said. "The operating system itself is going to be AI. That AI goes out through intent architecture, finds counterparties, negotiates, and settles on blockchain."
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