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Before Ilya Poloskin left Google In 2017, after brainstorming over lunch, he returned to his desk and built what was arguably the first Transformer: a neural network architecture that would enable generative artificial intelligence.
Currently, Poloskin is The Founder of Modern AI.
Poloskin wrote in his now famous 2017 paper,All it takes is attention” along with seven of his Google colleagues, who became known as “Transformers 8.” This was the first time that all seven appeared on stage together. NVIDIA“Everything we enjoy today can be traced back to that moment,” CEO Jensen Huang said at Microsoft’s annual developers conference in March.
Seven of the “Transformers 8” cast members joined Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at Nvidia’s annual developer conference GTC in San Jose on March 20, 2024. From left to right: Lukas Kayser, Noam Shazier, Aidan Gomez, Jensen Huang, Leon Jones, Jacob Uskolyte, Ashish Vaswani and Ilya Poloskin.
NVIDIA
Poloskin said Google began using Transformer in Google Translate in 2018, which led to “significant improvements,” but it wasn’t until OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 that the technology became widely adopted.
“Open AI had very little to lose by disclosing this,” Poloskin told CNBC. “If, for example, another company, especially a public company, had disclosed this and the first question they asked was answered inappropriately, that would be news.”
By the time the paper was published in late 2017, Poloskin had left Google to start his own AI company. nearalong with fellow software engineer Alexander Skidanov. All eight authors left Google, but Poloskin was the first.
“Google has a great research environment,” Polosukhin says, “great for learning and this kind of research. But if you want to move really quickly and, importantly, get something to users, Google is a big company that requires a lot of processes and, of course, security protocols and so on.”
After all, he said, “it doesn’t make sense for Google to launch something that isn’t a billion-dollar idea.”
During his time at Google, Poloskin was an advocate of open source.
“It was the right decision at the time to open it up and let everyone build on it,” he said.
At Near, Poloskin is focused on so-called user-owned AI that “optimizes user privacy and sovereignty.”
To hear the full conversation between CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Illia Polosukhin, watch the video.