AI's Transformer Brain Vaswani to Build India Team

Eight years ago, Ashish Vaswani led a team of Google Brain researchers that invented the transformer, the magic sauce behind generative AI.

- Shouvik Das

Eight years ago, Ashish Vaswani led a team of Google Brain researchers that invented the transformer, the magic sauce behind generative AI. The new model, which learns and generates human-like text, took the world by storm as it made its way into ChatGPT, and later, others like Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek.

India-born Vaswani, whose startup Essential AI works on building foundational models, now wants to establish an India team, access graphic processing units, find clients, and spot a local strategic investment partner.

"We're building foundational AI models to automate coding and tasks in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) applications. The core idea is to build the best models in specific fields, so that we can then partner with large clients who will license our models to build applications on," Vaswani said in an interview.

In June 2017, Vaswani led a Stanford University research funded under Google Brain, floating the transformer model now regarded as one of the world's most significant inventions in computer science—alongside the likes of Frank Rosenblatt's neural networks, and Sergey Brin-Larry Page's PageRank.

Asked whether he expected the model to have the kind of impact it did, Vaswani, who is in India after 16 years, said that he "could have never imagined it."