<\/p>\n
India-born Vaswani, whose startup Essential AI works on building foundational models, now wants to establish an India team, access graphic processing units, find clients and spot a local strategic investment partner.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re building foundational AI models to automate coding and tasks in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) applications. The core idea is to build the best models in specific fields, so that we can then partner with large clients who will licence our models to build applications on,” Vaswani said in an interview.<\/p>\n
In June 2017, Vaswani led a Stanford University research funded under Google Brain, floating the transformer model now regarded as one of the world\u2019s most significant inventions in computer science\u2014alongside the likes of Frank Rosenblatt\u2019s neural networks, and Sergey Brin-Larry Page\u2019s PageRank.<\/p>\n
Asked whether he expected the model to have the kind of impact it did, Vaswani, who is in India after 16 years, said that he \u201ccould have never imagined it.”<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I had set out to build was a better version of machine learning, and improving the way machine understanding worked. I never thought it would explode into what it is today, and the way it has taken over our lives.”<\/p>\n
Also read | Generative AI, data centres to define India\u2019s tech industries in 2025<\/a><\/p>\n Vaswani, 39, is chief executive of Essential AI, which he co-founded in 2023 alongside Niki Parmar, a co-inventor of the transformer model. He stayed on at Google until 2021, leaving to build Adept AI Labs\u2014a platform that today has a licensing deal with Amazon to build its AI initiatives. Vaswani and Parmar left Adept in less than two years over reported differences with investors, and started Essential AI.<\/p>\n GenAI burst into prominence when Sam Altman-led OpenAI, a Silicon Valley peer of Vaswani\u2019s, unveiled ChatGPT in November 2022. Since then, AI has become a household term, catapulting the field into prominence well beyond engineers and researchers.<\/p>\n His startup, which raised $56.5 million in December 2023 and counts AMD, Google and Nvidia as investors, will be looking to raise a second, larger funding round of around $100 million later this year, Vaswani said. \u201cThe results of our early foundational models are here, and they look good. We\u2019ll be using these results as a reference point for our next fundraise,” he said.<\/p>\n As part of this move, Vaswani is open to interest from Indian strategic partners as well. \u201cIndia has some of the brightest minds, and it is absolutely important that India pursues building its own AI. There\u2019s no reason why foundational work in AI cannot happen in India,” he said.<\/p>\n Read this | Mint Explainer: What OpenAI o1 \u2018reasoning\u2019 model means for the future of generative AI<\/a><\/p>\n Investors negotiating with global ventures concur, stating that foundational work in AI will have the scope to differentiate the work on GenAI that ventures across India and abroad are pursuing.<\/p>\n \u201cOne has to look at a big enough problem, and assess how many millions of people a problem impacts,” said Anand Daniel, partner at venture capital firm Accel. “Then, we look at the solution being built, and the foundational engineering that a venture is undertaking in order to build for the problem. It\u2019s still early days, but the scope for foundational work remains broader in the US, than what Indian startups have so far created,” Daniel added.<\/p>\n Both agree that there is room for ventures to exist even in the foundational engineering space in GenAI in the long run, despite a battle for dominance playing out in the US among the likes of Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.<\/p>\n \u201cI fully think that there is enough space now to build products and companies that exist alongside and outside the Big Tech environment, and that will further widen as generative AI evolves. Eventually, there is ample scope for many to disrupt the global technology environment,” Vaswani said.<\/p>\nFundraise<\/h2>\n
Foundational AI<\/h2>\n