Ashish Vaswani

Ashish Vaswani (born 1986)^[1] is an Indian origin computer scientist. Since 2022, he has been co-founder and CEO of Essential AI. Previously, he worked as a research scientist at Google Brain and Information Sciences Institute.

Ashish Vaswani
Born	1986
Alma mater	University of Southern California (PhD) Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra (B.Tech.)
Known for	Transformer (deep learning architecture)
Scientific career
Fields	Natural Language Processing Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence
Institutions	Google Brain (2016-2021)
Thesis	Smaller, Faster, and Accurate Models for Statistical Machine Translation  (2014)
Doctoral advisor	David Chiang Liang Huang

Vaswani is best known for his pioneering contributions in the field of deep learning, most notably the development of the Transformer neural network, which he co-authored in the landmark paper Attention Is All You Need. This breakthrough work fundamentally changed the landscape of artificial intelligence and laid the foundation for GPT, BERT, ChatGPT, and their successors.

Career

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.^[2] He did his PhD at the University of Southern California under the supervision of Prof. David Chiang.^[3] He has worked as a researcher at Google,^[4] where he was part of the Google Brain team. He was a co-founder of Adept AI Labs but has since left the company.^[5][6]

Notable works

Vaswani's most notable work is on the paper "Attention Is All You Need", published in 2017.^[7] 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,^[8] GPT-2, and GPT-3.