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Illia Polosukhin
CEO
NEAR AI
About
Illia Polosukhin is the Co-Founder of NEAR, on the mission to build User-Owned AI. He is best known as a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. Before founding NEAR Protocol in 2018, Illia was an AI researcher and contributor to TensorFlow at Google, where he worked on deep learning, natural language understanding, and large-scale ML infrastructure. His work has spanned from foundational research to building real-world systems. A pioneer at the intersection of blockchain and artificial intelligence, Illia is working to make AI open source, decentralized, privacy-preserving, and aligned to users.
