creators

Ashish Vaswani - Transformer first author, Essential AI

Ashish Vaswani wrote the first line of "Attention Is All You Need" and founded Essential AI; Axios reported in 2026 that Nvidia had acqui-hired his team.

Ashish Vaswani is a computer scientist who took a B.Tech in computer science at the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, and a PhD in computer science at the University of Southern California under David Chiang. He worked at Google Brain, where the transformer paper was written. Vaswani was the first author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer and put self-attention in place of recurrence in sequence-to-sequence models. The architecture became the basis of BERT, GPT and the large language models that followed. After Google he co-founded the agent startup Adept, left it, and co-founded Essential AI with fellow transformer co-author Niki Parmar, serving as chief executive; the company emerged from stealth in December 2023. In December 2025 Essential AI published Rnj-1, a pair of open base and instruction-tuned language models named for Ramanujan. In June 2026 Axios reported that Nvidia had acqui-hired the team behind Essential AI, including Vaswani. Nvidia has announced nothing, and Essential AI's own site, unchanged since 2025, still names him chief executive.

Specialization

transformers, large language models, foundation models

Country

United States