Illia Polosukhin of Google Transformer 8 and Near on democratizing AI

[Pelican Press 0]

Illia Polosukhin of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Transformer 8 and Near on democratizing AI

Before Illia Polosukhin left

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

in 2017, he had a brainstorming lunch and then returned to his desk to build what may have been the very first transformer, the neural network architecture that makes generative artificial intelligence possible.

Now, Polosukhin is considered one of the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

Polosukhin co-wrote the now famous 2017 paper, “

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

” along with seven

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

colleagues, who have collectively become known as the “Transformer 8.” Seven of them appeared on stage together for the first time at Nvidia‘s annual developer conference in March, where CEO Jensen Huang said, “Everything that we’re enjoying today can be traced back to that moment.”

Seven of the “Transformer 8” joined Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at GTC, Nvidia’s annual developer conference in San Jose on March 20, 2024. From left to right: Lukasz Kaiser, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Jensen Huang, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani and Illia Polosukhin.

Nvidia

Polosukhin said

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

started utilizing transformers in 2018 in

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Translate, which made for a “massive improvement.” But a broadly popular use of the technology didn’t come until OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022.

“OpenAI had very little to lose by opening this up,” Polosukhin told CNBC. “If, for example, any other company, especially public company, opened it up and the first question you ask there, it was like an inappropriate answer, that would be in the news.”

By the time the formative paper was published at the end of 2017, Polosukhin had exited

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

to start his own AI company,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, with fellow software engineer Alexander Skidanov. All eight of the authors have now left

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, although Polosukhin was the first to depart.

“

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

research is an amazing environment,” Polosukhin said. “It’s great for learning and kind of this research. But if you want to move really fast and, importantly, put something in front of a user then

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

is a big company with a lot of processes and, very rightfully so, security protocols, etc., that are required.”

Ultimately, he said, “for

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

it doesn’t make sense to launch something that’s not a $1 billion idea.”

While at

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, Polosukhin was a proponent of open source.

“At the time, opening it up and making it available to everyone to build on top of it was the right decision,” he said.

With Near, Polosukhin is focused on what he calls user-owned AI, “that optimizes for the privacy and sovereignty of users.”

Watch the video to hear the full conversation between CNBC’s Katie tarasov and and Illia Polosukhin.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Video First,NVIDIA Corp,NVIDIA Corp,Alphabet Class A,Jensen Huang,Technology,Alphabet Inc,Artificial intelligence,Generative AI,Breaking News: Technology,business news
#Illia #Polosukhin #

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Transformer #democratizing

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up