Before Ilya Polosukhin left Google In 2017, he had a brainstorming lunch and returned to his desk to build what may have been the first Transformer, the neural network architecture that made it possible to generate artificial intelligence.
Nowadays, Polosukhin is considered The founder of modern artificial intelligence.
Polosukhin co-wrote the now famous 2017 paper, “All you need is attention” and 7 Google colleagues, they are collectively known as “Transformers 8”. Seven of them appeared on stage together for the first time. NvidiaAt the annual developer conference in March, CEO Jensen Huang said, “Everything we enjoy today can be traced back to that moment.”
On March 20, 2024, seven members of “Transformers 8” attended Nvidia’s annual developer conference GTC in San Jose together with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Gomez, Jensen Huang, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani and Illia Polosukhin.
Nvidia
Polosukhin said Google started using Transformer in Google Translate in 2018, which has made “tremendous progress.” But it wasn’t until OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 that the technology became widely used.
“There’s nothing to lose by opening up AI,” Polosukhin told CNBC. “For example, if any other company, especially a public company, opens it, the first question you ask there, it’s like an inappropriate answer, it’s will be in the news.”
By the time this formative paper was published in late 2017, Porosukhin had quit Google and founded his own artificial intelligence company, near, together with software engineer Alexander Skidanov. All eight authors are now leaving Google, although Porosukhin was the first to leave.
“Google Research is an amazing environment,” Polosukhin said. “It’s great for learning and this kind of research. But if you want to move quickly and, importantly, put something in front of users, Google is a big company with a lot of processes, and rightfully so Security protocols, etc., are required.
Ultimately, he said, “it didn’t make sense for Google to launch an idea that wasn’t worth $1 billion.”
While working at Google, Polosukhin was a supporter of open source.
“At the time, it was the right decision to open it up and let everyone build on it,” he said.
On Near, Polosukhin focuses on what he calls user-owned artificial intelligence, “optimizing user privacy and sovereignty.”
Watch the video to hear the full conversation between CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Illia Polosukhin.
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