Ashish Vaswani

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Ashish Vaswani (born 1986)^[1] is an Indian computer scientist. He is the co-founder and CEO of Essential AI. He previously worked as a research scientist at Google Brain and Information Sciences Institute.

Vaswani is known for his contributions in the field of deep learning, partially as a co-author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer neural network.^[2] This breakthrough in artificial intelligence laid the foundation for GPT, BERT, ChatGPT, and their successors.

Vaswani completed his engineering in Computer Science from BIT Mesra in 2002. In 2004, he moved to the US to pursue higher studies at University of Southern California.^[3] He did his PhD at the University of Southern California under the supervision of Prof. David Chiang.^[4] He has worked as a researcher at Google,^[5] where he was part of the Google Brain team. He was a co-founder of Adept AI Labs, but has since left the company.^[6][7]

Vaswani's most notable paper, "Attention Is All You Need", was published in 2017.^[8] The paper introduced the Transformer model, which eschews the use of recurrence in sequence-to-sequence tasks and relies entirely on self-attention mechanisms. The model has been instrumental in the development of several subsequent state-of-the-art models in NLP, including BERT,^[9] GPT-2, and GPT-3.