Two famous former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers who published the seminal article that cleared the path for the generative AI boom have raised $8 million for their new business Essential AI. According to four sources
Essential AI, established by Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, was led by Thrive Capital. The company is still in secret mode, and no product has been released. Elad Gil, a conviction and angel investor, also joined in the round, according to a person close to the company.
Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital is also an investor in Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Essential AI’s goal is to create software for organizations to employ huge language models, the core software of a new artificial intelligence system that has driven generative AI applications like ChatGPT, according to sources.
Thrive Capital did not respond to requests for comment. Multiple requests for comment from Vaswani and Parmar were not returned.
Vaswani and Parmar received the boost after leaving Adept AI, which they co-founded in 2021 with former Google director David Luan.
Adept, a company that focuses on training neural networks to execute generic tasks for commercial clients, has raised $415 million in funding from investors such as generic Catalyst. According to sources, EssentialAI is not in direct competition with Adept.
Vaswani and Parmar are the first and third authors on Google’s 2017 research paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which introduced the “transformer” deep learning architecture that went on to become the basis for viral chatbot ChatGPT and the current race to develop products powered by generative AI.
The duo join other authors on the famous paper who have left Google (GOOGL.O) to start their own ventures and subsequently attracted millions in funding from venture investors, including Noam Shazeer, who is running AI chatbot startup Character.AI, and Aidan Gomez, who founded large language model startup Cohere.
Reuters
