NEAR has quickly become a frontrunner in the growing convergence of Web3 and AI, but its roots in AI go deeper than many realize. Interestingly, NEAR was not conceived as a blockchain project from the beginning. One of its co-founders, Illia Polosukhin, started this journey with a different goal in mind: to create an AI-driven business. As one of eight Google researchers who introduced the revolutionary Transformer model (a key architecture that powers some of today’s most popular AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT), Polosukhin initially sought to advance AI in a different way.