Illia Polosukhin is an experienced AI researcher and a co-author of the influential Transformer paper, “Attention is All You Need,” created during his tenure at Google Research. With extensive experience in machine learning and natural language processing, he has over ten years of expertise in AI and decentralized technologies. He currently leads NEAR AI, focusing on developing open-source infrastructure, tools, and products for agentic, privacy-focused AI systems. He appears on the podcast with Kevin Ball to share his journey, the inception of the Transformer model, the concept of user-owned AI, document-centric 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 has co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, established the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI Inaction discussion group through Latent Space.