The Eight Fathers of Transformer: Where Are They Now?
The founding authors of the seminal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture, have all departed from Google and are now pioneering diverse ventures across the AI landscape. Their current paths highlight the field's evolution and fragmentation.
Ashish Vaswani co-founded Essential AI after a stint at Adept, but recent reports suggest he and his team are being recruited by Nvidia. Noam Shazeer left Google twice, first to found Character.AI—later acquired by Google—before recently joining OpenAI. Niki Parmar, after co-founding both Adept and Essential AI with Vaswani, is now at Anthropic. Jakob Uszkoreit is the CEO of Inceptive, applying AI to RNA and drug design.
Llion Jones co-founded Sakana AI in Tokyo, exploring collective intelligence from smaller models. Aidan N. Gomez is the CEO of Cohere, focusing on enterprise AI solutions. Łukasz Kaiser remains in research at OpenAI, contributing to models like GPT-4 and o1. Illia Polosukhin co-founded the NEAR Protocol blockchain, positioning it for an AI-agent economy.
Despite their divergent paths—spanning biotech, enterprise software, blockchain, and foundational research—a shared sentiment persists: the Transformer is not the final answer. Each founder continues to seek the next significant architectural breakthrough, driven by the same innovative spirit that created the modern AI era.
marsbit06/28 05:30
