Ashish Vaswani
CEO of Essential AI, maker of the open Rnj-1 models; first-listed author of the Transformer paper
- CEO, Essential AI12
Ashish Vaswani is the CEO of Essential AI, according to the company's about page, and wrote the December 2025 announcement of Rnj-1, Essential AI's pair of 8B base and instruction-tuned language models, whose model card lists the Apache 2.0 license. Vaswani is also a co-author of the Essential-Web v1.0 paper, which presents a 24-trillion-token web dataset annotated with a twelve-category taxonomy. Earlier, Vaswani was listed with a Google Brain affiliation as the first-listed author of Attention Is All You Need (2017), whose contribution note says Vaswani, with Illia Polosukhin, designed and implemented the first Transformer models, and as first author of the 2018 Tensor2Tensor paper.123467
Work
Rnj-1Open weights
Author of Essential AI's December 2025 announcement of Rnj-1, an 8B base and instruction-tuned model pair that roughly follows the Gemma 3 architecture; the Hugging Face model card lists the Apache 2.0 license.23
Essential-Web v1.0Open data
Co-author of the 2025 Essential-Web v1.0 paper, which presents a 24-trillion-token dataset in which every document is annotated with a taxonomy; the dataset card lists the ODC-By license.45
Transformer (Attention Is All You Need) (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
First-listed author of the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer; the paper lists the author order as random and says Vaswani, with Illia Polosukhin, designed and implemented the first Transformer models.6
Tensor2Tensor (external site: github.com)Open-source code
First author of the 2018 Tensor2Tensor paper; the Apache-2.0 library, developed by the Google Brain team, includes the reference implementation of the Transformer.78
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- Listed with a Google Brain affiliation on 2017–2018 papers, Google Brain67
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