The eight authors of the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture underlying modern language models.
8 people
NVIDIA
Computer Scientist, Open Source Models
Vaswani co-invented the Transformer, the neural-network design behind ChatGPT and much of modern generative AI. As first author of “Attention Is All You Need” (2017), he helped show how AI could learn relationships between words while training faster—a breakthrough that enabled far larger language models.
OpenAI
Shazeer helped create the Transformer, the design behind modern language models. He also pioneered systems that activate only the parts of a model needed for each task, making very large models practical. He founded Character.AI and joined OpenAI in 2026 after returning to Google to co-lead Gemini.
Anthropic
Member of Technical Staff
Parmar co-authored the Transformer paper, introducing the design that became the foundation of modern language models. She then helped show that the same approach could recognize images and co-founded Adept and Essential AI to turn advanced models into practical tools.
Inceptive +1
Co-founder and CEO
Uszkoreit proposed replacing older language-model designs with self-attention, which lets a model connect relevant words across a sentence. This helped launch the Transformer architecture behind modern language AI. He later co-founded Inceptive, which uses AI to design RNA medicines that instruct or regulate cells.
Sakana AI
Co-founder and CTO
Jones was one of the Transformer's authors and is often credited with naming the paper "Attention Is All You Need." He later founded Sakana AI in Tokyo, known for nature-inspired approaches to model building.
Cohere
Co-founder and CEO
Aidan Gomez co-authored “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper that introduced the Transformer, a design behind today’s language models. He went on to co-found Cohere, building AI for businesses to search internal information and automate work.
OpenAI
Member of Technical Staff
Kaiser co-authored the Transformer, the design behind modern language AI, and co-built Tensor2Tensor, a library that helped researchers develop and share these models. At OpenAI he helped lead research on o1, which learns to work through difficult problems before answering.
NEAR +1
Co-founder
Polosukhin co-authored “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper that introduced the Transformer design behind modern language models. He co-founded NEAR Protocol and later NEAR AI, pursuing AI services that protect users’ data and give them more control over how it is used.