Illia Polosukhin is an experienced AI researcher and one of the original authors of the influential Transformer paper, Attention is All You Need, which he co-authored while at Google Research. He has extensive expertise in machine learning and natural language processing, and has spent more than ten years working where AI and decentralized technologies intersect. His current project is NEAR AI, where he focuses on developing open-source infrastructure, tools, and products for Agentic, privacy-preserving AI systems. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to share his journey, the origins of the Transformer model, the vision for user-owned AI, document-oriented development, and more.
Kevin Ball, also known as KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, started the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.