Ashish Vaswani

Career Vaswani completed his engineering in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra in 2002. In 2004, he enrolled at the University of Southern California for graduate studies. He earned his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California supervised by David Chiang. During his research career at Google, 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 later left the company. until June 2026 when Essential AI, including Vaswani, was acqui-hired by Nvidia.

Notable works Vaswani's most notable paper, "Attention Is All You Need", was published in 2017. 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), 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.