Illia Polosukhin

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]

Polosukhin studied at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, later relocating to San Diego and then moving to Silicon Valley.^[3]

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]

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]

• 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]

• Transformer (machine learning model)
• NEAR (blockchain platform)
• Self-attention