Ashish Vaswani has joined NVIDIA as a Computer Scientist on Open Source Models, according to his LinkedIn profile. The same profile shows his Essential AI Co-founder and CEO role ending in June 2026.
Two other former Essential AI researchers now also list NVIDIA roles. Alok Tripathy is a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA after working as Member of Technical Staff at Essential AI. Saurabh Srivastava is a Principal Scientist on Nemotron, Advanced Deep Learning Research after leading code-intelligence research at Essential AI.
Taken together, the LinkedIn updates point to NVIDIA acqui-hiring the Essential AI team rather than one isolated hire.