Illia Polosukhin
Ukrainian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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]
Illia Polosukhin | |
|---|---|
| |
| 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] |
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; et al. (2017). "Attention Is All You Need". arXiv.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)[6]
