Biography:Illia Polosukhin
Illia Polosukhin | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Ukraine |
| Known for | Co-author of Attention Is All You Need (transformer architecture)[1][2]; co-founding NEAR Protocol[1][2] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, Natural language processing, Blockchain |
| Institutions | Google[1][2]; NEAR Protocol[1][2] |
Illia Polosukhin is a Ukrainian-born computer scientist and entrepreneur known for his work on the transformer architecture in machine learning and for co-founding the NEAR blockchain.[1][2]
Early life and education
Polosukhin studied at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, later relocating to San Diego and then moving to Silicon Valley.[3]
Career
Google and transformer research
Polosukhin worked at Google and was part of the team associated with research on self-attention that culminated in the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need, widely credited with introducing the transformer architecture used in modern large language models.[1][2]
NEAR Protocol
After his work in machine learning, Polosukhin became a co-founder of NEAR Protocol and later associated with the NEAR Foundation ecosystem.[1][2]
In 2023, Polosukhin publicly argued that increasingly capable A.I. systems should be more transparent and user-controlled, and expressed skepticism that conventional regulation alone would solve problems created by closed, corporate models, warning about risks such as regulatory capture.[1] He has promoted “user-owned AI” concepts that combine open approaches with decentralized infrastructure aligned with the blockchain technology.[1][2]
In 2024, Polosukhin downplayed scenarios of A.I. independently causing human extinction, arguing that conflicts are driven by people and that misuse of AI would reflect human intent and incentives.[4] Later this year, Polosukhin said the NEAR Foundation would reduce its workforce by about 40%.[5]
Publications
- Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin (2017). "Attention Is All You Need". arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762.[6]
See also
- Transformer (machine learning model)
- NEAR (blockchain platform)
- Self-attention
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 "He Helped Invent Generative AI. Now He Wants to Save It". WIRED. 28 June 2024. https://www.wired.com/story/user-owned-ai-illia-polosukhin-open-source-web3/. Retrieved 6 March 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 "Why is one of the founding fathers of generative AI all in on Web3?". 24 August 2023. https://sifted.eu/articles/illia-polosukhin-web3.
- ↑ Пальчиков, Дмитро (28 November 2018). "Экс-гуглер Илья Полосухин — о том, как создать свой стартап, и почему Долина — не место будущего" (in ru). https://dou.ua/lenta/interviews/polosuhin-startap-silicon-valley/.
- ↑ Печенюк, Анастасия (4 July 2024). "«Войны начинают люди». Экс-сотрудник Google объяснил, почему ИИ не уничтожит человечество" (in ru). https://techno.nv.ua/popscience/polosuhin-pro-ii-50431835.html.
- ↑ Hunt, James (11 January 2024). "Near Foundation to cut staff by 40%, says treasury 'remains strong'". The Block. https://www.theblock.co/post/271858/near-foundation-staff-cut-treasury.
- ↑ "Illia Polosukhin". https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=3SyxFIAAAAAJ&hl=en.
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