ClaytonFogg at 22:35, 5 May 2026

2026-05-05T22:35:37Z

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{{Short description|Indian computer scientist}}
{{Infobox scientist
| name = Ashish Vaswani
| birth_date = 1986
| birth_place = India
| alma_mater = {{ Plainlist |
*[[University of Southern California]] ([[PhD]])
*[[Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra]] ([[B.Tech.]])
}}
| known_for = [[Transformer (deep learning architecture)]]
| fields = {{Plainlist|
*[[Natural Language Processing]]
*[[Deep Learning]]
*[[Artificial Intelligence]]
}}
| workplaces = {{ Plainlist |
*[[Google Brain]] (2016-2021)
}}
| thesis_title = Smaller, Faster, and Accurate Models for Statistical Machine Translation
| thesis_year = 2014
| doctoral_advisor = {{ Plainlist |
* David Chiang
* Liang Huang
}}
}}

'''Ashish Vaswani''' is an Indian [[computer scientist]] and entrepreneur. He conducted research at [[Google Brain]], co-founded Adept AI, and, as of 2025, was co-founder and chief executive officer of Essential AI.<ref name="GoogleAI-Transformer">{{Cite web |url=https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-network.html |title=Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding |date=August 31, 2017 |website=Google AI Blog |access-date=2026-05-05}}</ref><ref name="Reuters-Adept-2023">{{Cite news |last1=Rajesh |first1=Ananya Mariam |last2=Hu |first2=Krystal |date=2023-03-16 |title=AI startup Adept raises $350 mln in fresh funding |url=https://www.reuters.com/technology/adept-raises-350-mln-series-b-funding-2023-03-14/ |work=Reuters |access-date=2026-05-05}}</ref><ref name="Reuters-Essential-2023">{{Cite news |last1=Tong |first1=Anna |last2=Hu |first2=Krystal |date=2023-05-04 |title=Top ex-Google AI researchers raise funding from Thrive Capital |url=https://www.reuters.com/technology/top-ex-google-ai-researchers-raise-funding-thrive-capital-sources-2023-05-04/ |work=Reuters |access-date=2026-05-05}}</ref><ref name="ET-Essential-2025">{{Cite news |title=We would like to be DeepSeek in the West, says Essential AI cofounder |url=https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/we-would-like-to-be-deepseek-in-the-west-says-essential-ai-cofounder/articleshow/121891250.cms |work=The Economic Times |date=2025-06-17 |access-date=2026-05-05}}</ref>

Vaswani is a [[co-author]] of the 2017 paper "[[Attention Is All You Need]]", which introduced the [[Transformer (deep learning architecture)|Transformer]] neural network architecture.<ref>{{Cite Q | Q30249683 }}</ref> The Transformer model has been used in the development of subsequent NLP models [[BERT (language model)|BERT]], [[ChatGPT]], and their successors.

== Career ==
Vaswani completed his engineering in Computer Science from [[Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra]] (BIT Mesra) in 2002.
In 2004, he enrolled at the [[University of Southern California]] for graduate studies.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://officechai.com/stories/the-indian-researchers-whose-work-led-to-the-creation-of-chatgpt/|title=The Indian Researchers Whose Work Led To The Creation Of ChatGPT|first=OfficeChai|last=Team|date=February 4, 2023|website=OfficeChai}}</ref> He earned his PhD in Computer Science at the [[University of Southern California]] supervised by David Chiang.<ref>{{Cite news |date=2025-07-30 |title=8 Indian-origin AI and ML experts in the US: Where did they study |url=https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/8-indian-origin-ai-and-ml-experts-in-the-us-where-they-studied-and-their-impact/articleshow/122994310.cms |access-date=2025-12-31 |work=The Times of India |issn=0971-8257}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.isi.edu/~avaswani/|title=Ashish Vaswani's webpage at ISI|website=www.isi.edu}}</ref> During his research career at Google,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural-network.html|title=Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding|date=August 31, 2017|website=ai.googleblog.com}}</ref> Vaswani was part of the [[Google Brain]] team, where he conducted the work leading to the 'Attention Is All You Need' publication. Prior to joining Google, he was affiliated with the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.

After Google, Vaswani co-founded '''Adept AI''', a machine learning-focused startup that developed AI agents and tools for software automation. He has since left the company.<ref name="Reuters-Adept-2023" /> He later co-founded '''Essential AI''' with Niki Parmar.<ref name="Reuters-Essential-2023" /> As of 2025, he was chief executive officer of Essential AI.<ref name="ET-Essential-2025" />

== Notable works ==
Vaswani's most notable paper, "[[Attention Is All You Need]]", was published in 2017.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Dawson |first=Caitlin|url=https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2023/03/attention-is-all-you-need-usc-alumni-paved-path-for-chatgpt/|title=USC Alumni Paved Path for ChatGPT|website=USC Viterbi | School of Engineering |date=March 9, 2023}}</ref> The paper introduced the [[Transformer (machine learning model)|Transformer model]], which uses [[Attention (machine learning)|self-attention]] mechanisms instead of recurrence for [[Seq2seq|sequence-to-sequence]] tasks.

The Transformer architecture has become foundational to modern language models and [[Natural language processing|NLP]] systems, including [[BERT (language model)|BERT]] (2018),<ref>{{Cite arXiv|title=BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding|first1=Jacob|last1=Devlin|first2=Ming-Wei|last2=Chang|first3=Kenton|last3=Lee|first4=Kristina|last4=Toutanova|date=May 24, 2019|class=cs.CL |eprint=1810.04805}}</ref> [[GPT-2]], [[GPT-3]] (2019–2020) and many more recent models. The "Attention Is All You Need" paper is among the most cited papers in machine learning.

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vaswani, Ashish}}
[[Category:1986 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Computer scientists]]
[[Category:Indian computer scientists]]
[[Category:American Hindus]]
[[Category:Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, alumni]]
[[Category:USC Viterbi School of Engineering alumni]]
[[Category:Google employees]]

Ashish Vaswani - Revision history

ClaytonFogg at 22:35, 5 May 2026