Illia Polosukhin: Why AI Agents Are Still Useless (And What Fixes Them) | NEAR Founder on IronClaw

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Tech News, Technology, News

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2026

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

NEAR founder and Transformer co-author Illia Polosukhin joins us to break down why today’s AI agents still fall short, what’s missing to make them actually useful, and how IronClaw could unlock secure, private, autonomous AI. We also explore Illia’s bigger thesis: AI becomes the interface, blockchains become the backend, and both reshape how humans, agents, and digital markets interact. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast 🪐GALAXY | INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL FINANCE https://bankless.cc/galaxy-podcast 🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 🐇MEGAETH | 1ST REAL-TIME BLOCKCHAIN https://bankless.cc/megaeth ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:43 Illia’s AI Journey 8:19 AI x Blockchain Operating Systems 14:40 Will Humans & AIs Use the Same Systems? 18:20 Why Are AI Agents Still Useless? 28:54 AI Agent Privacy Concerns 35:30 IronClaw Privacy 39:21 AI Agent Limitations 47:00 Context Constraints 53:42 Will Small Teams Win? 57:16 Autonomous Agents & Businesses 1:01:00 Digital Life Forms? 1:02:42 e/acc Vs d/acc 1:09:44 Why isn’t AI Crypto-Pilled 1:14:31 Advice for Builders 1:18:30 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Illia https://x.com/ilblackdragon IronClaw https://agent.near.ai/ NEAR https://www.near.org/ Attention is All You Need https://arxiv.org/html/1706.03762v7 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	So one thing that people don't realize when they use Anthropic Open AI or even worse,
0:06.4	you use something else for inference, OpenClaught actually sends all your secrets to those
0:11.8	services as well.
0:12.7	Yeah.
0:13.6	So somewhere in Anthropic and Open AI logs, they have everybody's access keys, API keys,
0:20.7	and bearer tokens to access your g-mails and your notions.
0:25.2	It's actually insane that we're doing that.
0:28.9	Yeah. Ironclough fixes that. Like, the keys never touch LLM.
0:36.3	Bankless Nation, we are joined by Ilya Pisukin, the co-founder of Nira.
0:40.3	Ilya, welcome to Bankless.
0:42.0	Thanks for having me.
0:43.2	So, Ilya, you are one of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper.
0:47.1	The famous paper attention is all you need.
0:49.5	The thing that kind of just broke open the doors of AI research to turn into some of the products that we know
0:54.7	today, chat Djibout, et cetera. And then in 2017, you left Google where you were an AI researcher
1:00.7	writing this paper to go co-found near. Question for you. Do you regret leaving AI to go into
1:07.8	crypto? Well, the story was that I left Google to start near AI, which was AI company.
1:15.8	We were teaching machines to code, which is a fancy way to say vibe coding.
1:20.8	And in 2017, everybody thought we're somewhere between delusional and doing science fiction
1:25.4	network.
1:26.5	When I would go and tell people, no, no, machines will write all the code.
1:29.6	Like, don't worry about it.
	...

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