NEAR Co-founder Illia Polosukhin Opposes Statement to Pause Frontier AI Research

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin has opposed a joint statement signed by over a thousand frontier artificial intelligence researchers, calling on the government to slow down the development of frontier AI and establish governance tools. He believes that pausing AI research will not solve the issues at hand, as the root of safety concerns lies in the digital infrastructure not being prepared for general artificial intelligence. Polosukhin pointed out that government regulation is unlikely to effectively curb corporate competition, which could lead to restrictions on speech and access to knowledge. He advocates for the promotion of open-source and verifiable AI systems, including the development of open-source evaluation frameworks that do not rely on model weights, establishing alignment value functions tied to individual interests, and advancing formal verification and other technical solutions to address safety risks from a systemic perspective.