coindesk.com
Layer-1, $NEAR, will hire artificial-intelligence (AI) engineers as part of its 3-6 month roadmap to building user-owned AI.
According to a deck reviewed by CoinDesk, the company is planning to hire AI engineers “soon,” and its product team is working to plan AI workstreams over a 3-6 month transition phase. The deck was presented earlier today via a virtual town hall meeting by $NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin with $NEAR core employees.
This comes as the intersection between AI and blockchain continues to be a hot topic, with $NEAR attempting to position itself at the forefront. Polosukhin was on a panel at Nivida’s conference titled "Transforming AI" last month, and saw its token $NEAR double in price in anticipation of the event.
The company is well seasoned in terms of AI expertise, Polosukhin is an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer that co-built the ‘Transformer’ architecture. The architecture powers generative AI systems like ChatGPT.
$NEAR will use near.ai for surfacing AI information and will make an external announcement in May, according to the slide show.
The layer-1 says it believes it is uniquely positioned to make AI open source, given its not-for-profit and decentralized nature. The company also said the growth of revenue incentives will always take over at for-profit companies, whereas at $NEAR, its token economy will create value in an open, permissionless ecosystem.
$NEAR has been pushing its “chain abstraction,” narrative over the past few months, which aims to tackle the user experience in crypto by simplifying the hurdles that exist in a multichain environment. AI will help deliver $NEAR’s core vision by accelerating development & ease of use, according to the deck viewed by CoinDesk.