Ashish Vaswani

Indian-born computer scientist, listed first among the eight Google authors of 'Attention Is All You NeedAttention Is All You Need, prop. n.: The 2017 Google research paper that introduced the transformer, the neural-network design behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and nearly every other modern AI language system.' (2017), which introduced the transformertransformer, n.: The design behind today's chatbots and much of modern AI. It handles text by letting every word look at every other word and decide which of them matter for understanding it.. The architecture replaced recurrence with self-attentionself-attention, n.: Attention in which a passage looks at itself: every word checks every other word in the same text to work out its meaning in context, such as which noun 'it' refers to., letting every position in a sequence attend directly to every other and allowing training to run in parallel across the sequence; it underlies BERTBERT, prop. n.: An influential 2018 Google language model that learned to understand text by filling in hidden words. It made search engines and many language tools much better at grasping meaning in context., GPTGPT, abbr.: Short for 'generative pre-trained transformer', the family of OpenAI models behind ChatGPT. The letters are also used loosely for any similar chatbot model. and nearly all later large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.. The paper states that its authors contributed equally and are listed in random order, and credits Vaswani, with Illia Polosukhin, with designing and implementing the first transformer models. He completed a PhD at the University of Southern California on neural language models for machine translationmachine translation, n.: Software that renders writing or speech in one language into another language, as online translation services and phone translation apps do. before joining Google BrainGoogle Brain, prop. n.: Google's deep-learning research team from 2011 to 2023, where the transformer — the design behind today's chatbots — and the TensorFlow software were created.. In 2022 he co-founded the startup Adept AI Labs and then, with fellow co-author Niki Parmar, Essential AI, which he led as chief executive; in June 2026 Nvidia reportedly hired its team, including Vaswani.