Illia Polosukhin

Illia Polosukhin is the co-founder of NEAR Protocol and a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," the 2017 Google research paper that introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning modern generative AI. Born in Ukraine, he worked at Google as an AI researcher and engineering manager, contributing to TensorFlow and natural language understanding projects, before leaving in 2017 to build what became NEAR, a sharded Layer 1 blockchain focused on usability and scalability. He was appointed CEO of the NEAR Foundation in 2023 and has become a leading advocate for user-owned, decentralized AI. In 2022 he also helped create the Unchain Fund, which raised over $10 million in crypto humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

76 talks by Illia Polosukhin