Illia Polosukhin is a prominent figure in the blockchain and AI fields, best known as the Co-Founder and CEO of the NEAR Foundation. He co-created NEAR Protocol, a decentralized platform that supports the development of scalable, low-cost, and user-friendly decentralized applications (dApps). His vision for the NEAR Protocol began in 2017 with Alexander Skidanov, launching the protocol in 2020 to provide a robust foundation for Web3 applications. Before his work with NEAR, Illia made significant contributions to artificial intelligence while at Google, where he was a key contributor to the development of TensorFlow. Notably, he co-authored the influential research paper "Attention Is All You Need," which laid the foundation for transformer models, a major advancement in generative AI technologies like ChatGPT. Illia's expertise spans blockchain, AI research, and scalable digital ecosystems, making him a central figure in the convergence of these technologies.
