Illia Polosukhin, a veteran AI researcher and one of the original authors of the transformative paper, “Attention is All You Need,” wrote it during his tenure at Google Research. With an extensive background in machine learning and natural language processing, he has spent over ten years working at the intersection of AI and decentralized technologies. His current endeavor, NEAR AI, focuses on developing open-source infrastructure, tools, and products for Agentic, privacy-preserving AI systems. He joins a podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss 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 and founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup. Additionally, he organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.