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.[1][2][3][4]
Vaswani is a co-author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the Transformer neural network architecture.[5] The Transformer model has been used in the development of subsequent NLP models 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.[6] He earned his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California supervised by David Chiang.[7][8] During his research career at Google,[9] 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.[2] He later co-founded Essential AI with Niki Parmar.[3] As of 2025, he was chief executive officer of Essential AI.[4]
Notable works
Vaswani's most notable paper, "Attention Is All You Need", was published in 2017.[10] The paper introduced the Transformer model, which uses self-attention mechanisms instead of recurrence for sequence-to-sequence tasks.
The Transformer architecture has become foundational to modern language models and NLP systems, including BERT (2018),[11] 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
- ↑ Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding. Google AI Blog(August 31, 2017). Retrieved 2026-05-05.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 AI startup Adept raises $350 mln in fresh funding. Reuters(2023-03-16). Retrieved 2026-05-05.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Top ex-Google AI researchers raise funding from Thrive Capital. Reuters(2023-05-04). Retrieved 2026-05-05.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 We would like to be DeepSeek in the West, says Essential AI cofounder. The Economic Times(2025-06-17). Retrieved 2026-05-05.
- ↑ Template:Cite Q
- ↑ The Indian Researchers Whose Work Led To The Creation Of ChatGPT, Team, OfficeChai. OfficeChai(February 4, 2023).
- ↑ 8 Indian-origin AI and ML experts in the US: Where did they study. The Times of India(2025-07-30). Retrieved 2025-12-31.
- ↑ Ashish Vaswani's webpage at ISI. www.isi.edu.
- ↑ Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding. ai.googleblog.com(August 31, 2017).
- ↑ USC Alumni Paved Path for ChatGPT, Dawson, Caitlin. USC Viterbi | School of Engineering(March 9, 2023).
- ↑ Template:Cite arXiv