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Illia Polosukhin
NEAR Protocol
Illia Polosukhin is a Ukrainian AI researcher, entrepreneur, and co-founder of NEAR Protocol, a decentralized developer platform powered by a sharded smart contract blockchain.12 His career spans significant contributions to both artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
Career Highlights
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Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol (June 2017 - Present): Polosukhin co-founded NEAR, focusing on creating a scalable, robust, and highly usable blockchain platform.12
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Google Research (January 2014 - February 2017): As an Engineering Manager, he led a team of Deep Learning and Natural Language Understanding Researchers and worked on TensorFlow, specifically TF.Learn (SKFlow).1
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Salford Systems (February 2008 - January 2014): As a Software Engineer, he developed tools for big data predictive analytics, text mining, and geo mining.1
Education
- Master's degree in Applied Math and Computer Science from National Technical University "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute" (2007 - 2013).1
Notable Achievements
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Co-authored the influential paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer model, a breakthrough in AI research.24
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Founded the Unchain Fund, a philanthropic initiative leveraging blockchain technology for humanitarian aid, particularly supporting those affected by the conflict in Ukraine.3
Vision and Advocacy
Polosukhin is a strong advocate for decentralization and user-owned AI. He envisions a future where AI development is driven by community ownership, fostering innovation and equity in the AI landscape.4 Through NEAR Protocol and his other initiatives, he aims to create more transparent, accountable, and user-controlled technological ecosystems.43
Highlights
IronClaw v0.26 is out 🚀
Major highlight is self improving RLM engine (v2) that has gotten a lot more stable over the past week.
Another big work stream is multi tenancy - the only claw that can be shared by the team or enterprise due to security isolation approach. https://t.co/kXD8ifFenX
In trying times like this it was great to see collaboration between 5 different ecosystem teams and also global partners to track down what happened, responsible actor and recover funds.
Security and resilience is going to be an ever more important goals for NEAR overall.

