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Before Ilya Polosukhin left Google in 2017, he had a brainstorming lunch and then came back to his desk to build something that might have been the first transformer, even before generating artificial intelligence became possible neural network architecture. Now, Polosukhin is considered one of the founding fathers of modern artificial intelligence. Polosukin co-authored the now-famous 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need” with seven colleagues at Google, collectively known as the “Transformers 8”. The seven of them first appeared together at the March annual Nvidia developer conference, where CEO Huang Renxun said, “Everything we enjoy today can be traced back to that moment.”
On March 20, 2024, the seven “Transformers 8” attended the annual Nvidia developer conference GTC in San Jose with Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun. From left to right: Lucas Keizer, Norm Schazl, Aidan Gomez, Huang Renxun, Leon Jones, Jacobus Uskoreet, Ashish Vaswani, and Ilya Polosukhin. Nvidia
Polosukhin said Google began using transformers in Google Translate in 2018, bringing “huge improvements.” However, it was not until November 2022 that OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which brought widespread application of the technology. Polosukhin told CNBC in an interview, “After open sourcing, there was almost no downside.” “For example, if any other company, especially a public company, opens it, the first question you ask there is, like an inappropriate answer, it will appear in the news.” By the end of 2017 when the formative paper was published, Polosukhin had already left Google and co-founded his own artificial intelligence company Near with software engineer Alexander Skidanov. Although Polosukhin was the first to leave, all eight authors have now left Google. “Google’s research is an amazing environment,” Polosukhin said. “This is beneficial for learning and this type of research. But if you want to act quickly, more importantly, put something in front of users, then Google is a big company with a lot of processes, of course, security protocols, and so on.” Ultimately, he said, “For Google, it doesn’t make sense to launch an idea that isn’t worth a billion dollars.” At Google, Polosukhin was an advocate for open source. He said, “At the time, opening it up and allowing everyone to build on it was the right decision.” At “Near,” Polosukhin focuses on what he calls user-owned artificial intelligence, “which optimizes user privacy and sovereignty.” Watch the full conversation between CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Illia Polosukin and listen to the video.
