According to Foresight News, Illia Polosukhin, the founder of NEAR, has announced the overall plan for the research and development lab, NEAR AI. The plan involves the realization of open-source and user-owned Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in three stages. These stages include AI Developer, which involves teaching machines to code, AI Researcher, which uses AI Developer to instruct machines to conduct research, and finally, using AI researchers to promote scientific development and move towards universally shared AGI.
Polosukhin stated that the development of NEAR AI will always be open-source, providing software, datasets, and models to a broader community for further development of other products. The project will require a range of infrastructure that goes beyond the core blockchain primitives, including peer-to-peer communication, edge data and inference, decentralized data storage, and private computing. More developers than ever will be needed to write code to train models. All of this can only be achieved by participating in the entire NEAR ecosystem and utilizing the existing NEAR token economy.