The paper that ate the world
In June 2017, a group of eight researchers at Google published a 15-page paper and titled it after a Beatles lyric. "Attention Is All You Need" - arXiv:1706.03762 - was presented at NeurIPS that December. It introduced the Transformer architecture: no recurrence, no convolutions, just attention mechanisms all the way down.
Within two years, GPT-2 ran on it. Within three, BERT did too. Today, if it understands language - ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, LLaMA, Mistral, Grok - it's a Transformer. The eight names on that paper essentially wrote the operating system that modern AI is running. Illia Polosukhin was one of them.
Then, almost immediately, all eight left.
"For-profit can very quickly become for-control."
- Illia Polosukhin, 'Attention' Substack, 2025The exodus from Google after that paper is one of the stranger footnotes in tech history. The authors dispersed into the industry like seeds in wind. Polosukhin took a different angle than most. While others went deeper into AI companies, he went sideways - into blockchain. Not because he doubted AI, but because he'd already seen the problem it was building toward.
He started NEAR in 2017 with his friend and fellow engineer Alexander Skidanov. The first idea was NEAR.ai - an AI startup focused on program synthesis, teaching machines to write code. It was a small operation in a WeWork in San Francisco, two engineers working on a problem they found fascinating. Then they realized: the infrastructure to make AI trustworthy didn't exist. So they'd build it.
By 2018 they'd pivoted. NEAR.ai became NEAR Protocol - a layer-1 blockchain built for scale, speed, and developer accessibility. The AI DNA stayed buried in the architecture. Seven years later, it's become the thesis.
In November 2023 Polosukhin took the title of CEO at NEAR Foundation. The timing was deliberate. The AI boom was reaching temperatures that made him uncomfortable - not because of what AI could do, but because of who would own it. Corporate AI, he argued in his Substack newsletter (launched August 2025, named "Attention" - because of course it is), doesn't optimize for users. It optimizes for shareholders. And those two things are not the same thing.
His current project: NEAR AI. Privacy-preserving AI inference in hardware-backed confidential enclaves. Private Chat that even NEAR's servers can't read. IronClaw, a Rust-based agent harness that hit 12,000+ GitHub stars in its first year. Partnerships with Brave, OpenMind, and Phala, reaching a combined 100 million users. He calls it "User-Owned AI." The pitch is simple: your AI should work for you, not the company that sells it to you.
He grew up in Ukraine, taught himself to code as a teenager, and took freelance jobs before university. He's still coding. His GitHub username - ilblackdragon - predates his Google career, his papers, and his blockchain. It's the one thread that runs through everything.