Illia Polosukhin is a veteran AI researcher and one of the original authors of the landmark Transformer paper, Attention is All You Need, which he co-authored during his time at Google Research. He has a deep background in machine learning and natural language processing, and has spent over a decade working at the intersection of AI and decentralized technologies. His current venture is called NEAR AI, and He’s focused on building open-source infrastructure, tools, and products for Agentic, privacy-preserving AI systems. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss his journey, the origins of the Transformer model, the vision for user-owned AI, document-oriented development, and much more.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Sponsors
This episode of Software Engineering Daily is brought to you by Capital One.
How does Capital One stack? It starts with applied research and leveraging data to build AI models. Their engineering teams use the power of the cloud and platform standardization and automation to embed AI solutions throughout the business. Real-time data at scale enables these proprietary AI solutions to help Capital One improve the financial lives of its customers. That’s technology at Capital One.
Learn more about how Capital One’s modern tech stack, data ecosystem, and application of AI/ML are central to the business by visiting www.capitalone.com/tech.
