Ilya Polosikin 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 agenic 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 K. Ball, 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.

Check out the show notes to follow KBall on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website,

kball.l. LLC. Ilya, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, excited to get to talk with you.

Let's maybe start with a little bit of intro about you, your background,

and what you're up to these days. For sure, yeah. Well, I've been, I guess, tech gig since I was 10

years old, been building a lot of video games back in a day, and then got really excited about

machine learning when I was like, well, about AI in general and then started learning

machine learning. I was like 14. I was building my first neural networks in Pascal and got a job

actually remotely. So I'm originally from Ukraine working for this machine learning company out of San Diego.

And they were happy with my work. And so they offered me to move.

...