The Neuron: AI Explained Illia Polosukhin: Fixing the Broken System He Helped Create
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Sep 12, 2025 Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the groundbreaking Attention Is All You Need and co-founder of NEAR Protocol, shares his vision for a reimagined AI landscape. He argues that today’s centralized AI is broken and champions User-Owned AI for better privacy and user alignment. The conversation dives into the evolution of AI technologies, ethical concerns with current systems, and innovative blockchain solutions that could enhance AI operations. Illia also highlights the potential of open protocols in improving trust and creating personalized AI experiences.
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Transformers Sparked A Step Change
- Illia says transformers were a clear step-function but the path to AGI remained uncertain and slower than he expected.
- He attributes rapid recent progress to massive compute, funding, and global attention accelerating innovation.
Training Quality Matters As Much As Scale
- Illia highlights that improving training methods matters as much as making models bigger because better training raises quality at fixed size.
- He points to new optimizers and the messy, empirical nature of current training as the next frontier.
Context Is The Hidden Bottleneck
- Illia argues context is a major bottleneck: models lack up-to-date, personal, and company-specific knowledge.
- Unlocking private context would dramatically increase real-world adoption and usefulness.
