Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, the authors of the seminal 2017 research paper that popularized the use of large language models in AI, have raised $8M for their new stealth-mode startup, Essential AI .
Thrive Capital led the funding round, with participation from Conviction and angel investor Elad Gil, as the company aims to build software for enterprises to use large language models.
- The company aims to build software for enterprises to use large language models, which have powered generative AI applications such as ChatGPT.
- Other authors on the paper who have also left Google to start their own ventures include Noam Shazeer, who runs AI chatbot startup Character.AI, and Aidan Gomez, who founded large language model startup Cohere.
- Although there is not a lot of detail on the company, which is in stealth mode, it comes at a time when the founders left Adept AI, a company they also founded back in 2021 with a focus on neural network training.