Illia Polosukhin is a seasoned AI researcher and one of the original contributors to the foundational Transformer paper, Attention is All You Need, which he co-authored while at Google Research. With extensive experience in machine learning and natural language processing, Illia has spent over a decade working at the intersection of AI and decentralized technologies. His current project is NEAR AI, where he is dedicated to developing open-source infrastructure, tools, and products for privacy-preserving AI systems. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss his career, 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, initiated the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.