In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and CEO of the NEAR Foundation, to discuss his journey from helping develop the transformer architecture behind ChatGPT and Claude to building a blockchain ecosystem focused on user-owned AI. We explore what happens to our personal information when we use AI, why concentrating intelligence in the hands of a few companies could be dangerous, and how cryptography could give indi