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.
Polosukhin studied at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, later relocating to San Diego and then moving to Silicon Valley.
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.
After his work in machine learning, Polosukhin became a co-founder of NEAR Protocol and later associated with the NEAR Foundation ecosystem.
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. He has promoted âÂÂuser-owned AIâ concepts that combine open approaches with decentralized infrastructure aligned with the blockchain technology.
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. Later this year, Polosukhin said the NEAR Foundation would reduce its workforce by about 40%.