Illia Polosukhin

Overview

Illia Polosukhin is a public figure in two technical fields: AI research and blockchain. He is one of eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need," a paper submitted to arXiv on 12 June 2017 ^[1]. A Google Research Blog post dated 31 August 2017 names him among the authors of the Transformer research ^[2]. He is also a co-founder of NEAR Protocol; NEAR's website says the project was co-founded by him and describes him as "an AI pioneer who introduced the Transformer architecture" ^[3]. In a NEAR post dated 22 May 2024, the signature reads "Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol & CEO of NEAR Foundation" ^[6].

The Transformer paper

The Transformer is a neural network architecture for processing sequences, such as the words in a sentence. Its central mechanism is self-attention: when the model represents one position in a sequence, it can weigh information from other positions directly, instead of passing information only step by step through recurrence. The paper's title, "Attention Is All You Need," signals this focus on attention. Polosukhin is listed as one of its eight authors, and the paper was submitted to arXiv on 12 June 2017 ^[1]. Google's Research Blog post dated 31 August 2017 also identifies him among the Transformer authors ^[2]. The paper's importance lies in its proposal of an architecture organized around attention rather than recurrence.

NEAR Protocol

NEAR Protocol is a blockchain project. NEAR's own history page says Illia Polosukhin and Alexander Skidanov founded NEAR Protocol in 2018 with the goal of building a scalable, usable blockchain ^[5]. A blockchain is a shared record of transactions maintained by multiple participants; "scalable" means it is meant to handle growth in use, and "usable" points to the experience of building on or using the network. NEAR's blog says the MainNet Genesis Block officially started the MainNet blockchain on April 22, 2020 ^[4]. In the 22 May 2024 post, Polosukhin's signature identifies him as co-founder of NEAR Protocol and CEO of NEAR Foundation ^[6]. The same post says the NEAR.AI R&D Lab is led by Alex Skidanov and him ^[6]. That places his later public work at the intersection of NEAR's blockchain project and AI research organization.

Public role and significance

Polosukhin's documented public roles connect two areas: the Transformer paper in AI and the founding and leadership of NEAR Protocol in blockchain ^[1][3][6]. His authorship on the Transformer paper is recorded in the arXiv listing and in Google's 2017 Research Blog post ^[1][2]. NEAR's materials record his co-founding role, the project's 2018 founding with Alexander Skidanov, the 2020 start of MainNet, and his 2024 signature as co-founder and CEO of NEAR Foundation ^[3][4][5][6]. NEAR also states that the NEAR.AI R&D Lab is led by Alex Skidanov and him ^[6]. For a general reader, these public facts trace a career from co-authorship of an attention-based architecture to co-founding and leading a blockchain project and an AI lab.