Illia Polosukhin

In this course

Illia Polosukhin is a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," the foundational 2017 paper from Google Brain that introduced the Transformer architecture, which became the basis for modern large language models. While Polosukhin appears here primarily as a technical contributor rather than as a theorist of AI's social implications, the Transformer mechanism his work defined is central to understanding how contemporary AI systems process and generate information—a crucial technical substrate for the course's investigation of AI's entanglement with culture and control. The paper's emphasis on attention mechanisms (where the model learns to weight different inputs dynamically) resonates with cybernetic feedback loops and distributed cognition that the seminar explores through both technical and artistic lenses.

Mentioned in 2 readings