Blockchain and AI design, from coauthored machine-learning papers to NEAR's approach to programmable money.
Why read Illia Polosukhin?
Illia's work connects two useful reading paths: machine-learning research and the design of blockchain applications. Attention Is All You Need is the technical foundation for understanding his research background. Neural Program Search asks a different question: how to generate a program from a natural-language description and a few examples of its inputs and outputs.
His NEAR commentary gives you the builder's own explanation of the network's direction. In his September 2026 post, he distinguishes permission to own assets or deploy a contract from the policies of individual applications and liquidity providers. Start there for a concrete protocol-versus-application distinction, then use the papers if you want to explore the AI research behind his broader work.
Start with the original
Selected work
Post ·
Permissionless programmable money and application policies
Does a permissionless network require every application to process every transaction? His opening distinction explains how network access and a provider's transaction policy are separate questions.
Paper ·
Attention Is All You Need
What was the Transformer proposal? This coauthored research paper introduces an architecture based on attention instead of recurrence or convolution. It is a technical paper for readers with machine-learning background.
Paper ·
Neural Program Search: Solving Programming Tasks from Description and Examples
Can descriptions and input/output examples guide program generation? Coauthored with Alexander Skidanov, this paper combines a learned model, a domain-specific language and program search.