Near plans AI chatbot to help users code decentralized apps

Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin believes that there’s a need for user-owned AIs that are optimized for people’s well-being and economic success.

Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin shared the company’s goal of empowering visionaries without technical coding skills with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that can create decentralized applications (DApps) for them. 

In an interview with Cointelegraph Managing Editor Gareth Jenkinson, Polosukhin shared the company’s vision to allow users to become project founders even if they do not have coding skills. He said:

“Pretty much, we wanted people to be able to just tell what applications they want and the computer will write code for them and build the application end-to-end.”

According to the Near executive, their goal is to create the infrastructure allowing space to “break through the current state” of having few developers and end-user applications. With Near’s upcoming AI tool, anyone with an idea can bring it to life.

For example, Polosukhin said that if one wants to create a freelance marketplace, the AI can assist in everything from writing user stories and creating freelancer profiles to developing a smart contract and a front-end user interface.

The AI would also be able to write middleware that connects everything. Furthermore, Polosukhin explained that the founders could edit the program and add more features that might be missing from the application.

Apart from the upcoming AI tool, the duo also spoke about risks associated with AI. Polosukhin believes that the biggest risk to AI is being used by centralized companies to manipulate people into doing their bidding to get more revenue. He explained:

“What happens with AI models is that they are really good at manipulating people, right? If you let them and your objective is generating more revenue, they will manipulate people to spend more time on them.”

While this type of play might not be ethical to many, Polosukhin believes it is not an “evil plan.” The executive believes it is a systemic problem caused by big corporations’ inherent need to demonstrate further growth.

Related: How decentralization can mitigate ‘dystopic’ artificial intelligence risks — SingularityNET exec

The executive believes there needs to be more user-owned AI to combat this type of risk. These models will have the role of protecting users against malicious actors attempting to take advantage of them. He explained:

“These are AI models that serve on your side. They’re optimized for your well-being, economic success. They could preserve your data, preserve your assets. And, to achieve that, things needs to be open source.”

He also added that Web3 is “really good” at designing such architectures. Because of this, the executive believes that Near is in a perfect position to build user-owned AI. “Thing is really, really, mashed together. But we do need to kind of actually build a lot of this infrastructure.”