PANews reported on May 22 that Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the public chain project NEAR Protocol, tweeted that NEAR will focus on creating a user-owned AI ecosystem, dedicated to optimizing user privacy and sovereignty. The NEAR Foundation has committed to incubating and investing in AI infrastructure projects based on NEAR, including computing and reasoning, data curation and creator rewards, crowdsourcing and synthetic data markets, and smart infrastructure.

The NEAR Foundation has established the @near_ai AI RD lab, led by Alex Skidanov and Illia Polosukhin, focusing on developing AI developer tools that allow anyone to build end-to-end Web3 applications without writing code. Illia stated that NEAR is the best platform for building and incubating the next generation of AI projects. As a well-resourced non-profit organization, the NEAR Foundation possesses strong expertise in the AI and Web3 fields, capable of driving the user-owned AI movement, providing an alternative to closed, centralized players, and achieving success on a global scale.