Unlike many newcomers to the Web3 space, Illia Polosukhin has been involved in AI for a long time. Prior to co-founding the decentralized application blockchain protocol NEAR, Polosukhin worked as an AI researcher at Google and co-authored the groundbreaking 2017 paper 'Attention is All You Need', which laid the foundation for the 'transformer' technology used in popular large language models like ChatGPT. His background in AI is exceptional.
Polosukhin expressed his concerns about AI being controlled and biased by a single entity, stating, 'AI is a potent force, but we don't want it to be dominated by one company.' To address this, he is now combining his passion for AI with NEAR's mission of decentralization, aiming to create a complete ecosystem for decentralized AI that encompasses computing, training, and agents. The seriousness with which Polosukhin is pursuing this goal was evident at NEAR's recent conference in Bangkok, where 'AI is NEAR' signs were prominently displayed. This profile is included in CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package, featuring all of this year's nominees.