Illia Polosukhin, one of Google's 'Transformer 8,' aims to make artificial intelligence more accessible to everyone.

In 2017, Illia Polosukhin left and 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 founding fathers of modern AI.

The "Transformer 8," consisting of Polosukhin and seven Google colleagues, co-authored the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need." This paper has since become renowned, and CEO Jensen Huang of NVIDIA acknowledged its significance at the company's annual developer conference in March, stating, "Everything we enjoy today can be traced back to that moment."

Google began using transformers in Google Translate in 2018, resulting in a significant improvement. However, it wasn't until OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 that the technology gained widespread popularity.

"Polosukhin stated to CNBC that OpenAI had little to lose by opening up, as any other company, especially a public one, would face severe consequences if an inappropriate answer was given to the first question asked."

Polosukhin and Skidanov exited Google in 2017 to start their own AI company, Near. Since then, all eight authors of the formative paper have left the company, with Polosukhin being the first to depart.

"Polosukhin stated that Google's research environment is excellent for learning and research. However, if one wants to move quickly and provide something to users, Google, being a large corporation, has numerous processes and security protocols that must be followed."

He stated that for Google, it doesn't make sense to launch anything that isn't a $1 billion idea.

While at Google, Polosukhin was a proponent of open source.

He stated that at that moment, making it accessible for everyone to add to it was the best course of action.

Polosukhin is concentrating on developing user-owned AI that prioritizes user privacy and sovereignty with Near.

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder and CEO of Tron, discusses the company's plans for decentralized finance and the future of blockchain technology with CNBC's Katie Tarasov.