Illia Polosukhin
Illia Polosukhin is considered as one of the founding fathers of modern AI. He is best known as the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of NEAR Protocol, a fully-sharded, proof-of-stake blockchain built for mainstream adoption. Together with his co-founder Alex Skidanov, he is leading a change within the applications of AI by challenging the established role of developers and creating value for the end consumer. Illia is a visionary entrepreneur and technology pioneer at the forefront of the blockchain and artificial intelligence revolution. He has more than 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a major TensorFlow contributor and managed the team building question-answering capabilities for the core Google search, as well as an author of several notable research papers.
Illia Polosukhin Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
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Engineering Manager
NEAR Protocol is a decentralized developer platform powered by a sharded smart contract blockchain.
The protocol is a highly scalable blockchain network that provides a developer-friendly decentralized application platform. I
It aims to address challenges such as slow transaction speeds, low throughput, and limited interoperability that have been a hurdle for other blockchains.
Illia was Engineering Manager and Researcher at Google, where he led a Deep Learning team working on Natural Language Understanding and TensorFlow.
He co-wrote the now famous 2017 paper, “Attention Is All You Need” along with seven Google colleagues, who have collectively become known as the “Transformer 8.”
He is one of the co-creators of the transformer model — the type of AI architecture that powers generative AI systems like ChatGPT (the “T” stands for transformer).
His research was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the major LLMs of today, such as ChatGPT and Bard.
He started his career as a Software Engineer at Salford Systems, where he was in charge of the development of new tools for big data predictive analytics, text mining, geo mining, and the refinement of the existing Salford Predictive Miner toolkit.
MEDIA & PUBLICATIONS
Illia has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg, TIME, Wired, New York Magazine, Forbes, and TechCrunch.
He has also been featured in CNBC, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, and Blockworks.
He has appeared as a guest on Real Vision.