@ilblackdragon Illia Polosukhin is not a household name in most crypto circles, but his academic fingerprints are on almost every AI product you use today. He is one of the eight co-authors o
@ilblackdragon Illia Polosukhin is not a household name in most crypto circles, but his academic fingerprints are on almost every AI product you use today. He is one of the eight co-authors of the 2017 Google Brain paper "Attention Is All You Need," the research that introduced the Transformer architecture and made every modern large language model possible. The "T" in GPT stands for Transformer. Without that paper, ChatGPT as we know it would not exist.
Polosukhin was a former engineering manager at Google Research, where he co-authored the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture. Shortly after its publication, he left Google and teamed up with @AlexSkidanov Alexander Skidanov. The two joined forces to co-found NEAR AI with a specific, concrete goal: build AI models that could write code from natural language descriptions.
To train those models, the team hired students from around the world. Many of those contributors had no bank account, which made paying them a genuine operational problem. Crypto seemed like the obvious fix, but it quickly fell short. Fees were too high and networks too slow for the practical, high-frequency payments the team needed. After starting with a focus on program synthesis, they shifted towards developing a more scalable blockchain solution when Ethereum's technology did not meet their needs.
Their initial estimate was six months to build something usable. It took considerably longer.
Development of the NEAR network began in August 2018, and the mainnet officially launched in April 2020, with full network participation and governance handed over to the community in October 2020.NEAR Protocol launched its mainnet on April 22, 2020 with 1 billion $NEAR tokens created at genesis.
NEAR is a Layer 1 blockchain designed for usability and scalability, featuring a sharded architecture called Nightshade that allows the network to scale throughput by splitting processing across multiple shards.Shortly after launch, NEAR announced the closing of a $21.6 million token sale led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
What began as a workaround for a payroll problem ultimately produced one of the more credentialed founding stories in the Layer 1 space: a co-author of the paper that underpins modern AI, building a blockchain precisely because existing infrastructure could not support his own research.
Sources:NEAR Protocol, WikipediaNEAR Protocol Launches Following $21M Token Sale, CoinDeskNEAR Protocol on CoinMarketCap
