The project will be developed through the contributions of thousands of participants on the new Near AI Research hub. From today, November 10, participants can join the training of a smaller 500 million parameter model. The project will grow across seven models, with only the best contributors advancing to work on progressively more complex and larger models.

The model’s privacy and security will be ensured through encrypted Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Contributors will be rewarded, and constant updates will be encouraged as the technology progresses. Near Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin mentioned that the expensive training and computing costs will be funded through token sales, raising about $160 million.

Polosukhin explained that token holders would be repaid from the inferences made when the model is used. This creates a business model that can be reinvested into future models.

With contributions from Illia Polosukhin, one of the authors of the groundbreaking transformer research behind ChatGPT, and Alex Skidanov, who has OpenAI experience, the Near team is well-equipped for the task. However, Skidanov mentioned that training such a large model would require “tens of thousands of GPUs,” which is not ideal for a centralized system. A decentralized network of compute may be the solution, but it would require new technology that does not yet exist.

Near Protocol‘s ambitious open-source AI project could revolutionize both the crypto and AI industries if successful.

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Using the example of Solana, Snowden discussed the impact of venture capital (VC). He mentioned that Solana was “born in prison,” referring to its heavy reliance on VC funding. According to Snowden, this kind of financial backing can limit a blockchain network’s independence and decentralization goals.

Despite Solana’s rapid growth, Snowden expressed concerns that too much control by large investors could undermine decentralization principles. However, he acknowledged that Solana could still “become something” in the future.

A significant portion of his talk focused on decentralization and the impact of AI-driven surveillance. Snowden warned that AI-enhanced surveillance systems could increase the real-time processing of personal data, potentially enabling large-scale data analysis. He said:

“They want to train it on everything, and then they want to be able to say, you know, who looks anomalous. Look at everybody, look at the whole human body, and pick out anybody who is weird.”

Snowden also discussed the influence of VC investments by referencing Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which voted against a proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on BNB Chain. The venture capital firm used its 15 million Uniswap (UNI) tokens to outweigh the initial 20 million “yes” votes, highlighting how large stakeholders can dominate decentralized projects.

Finally, Snowden emphasized the importance of decentralization and privacy in emerging technologies like blockchain and AI, stressing that these principles need to be safeguarded as the technology develops.

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