Part V · The Transformer

The eight who scattered

All eight authors of “Attention Is All You Need” (2017) worked at Google. Within a few years, nearly every one had left to start or join a company in the race the paper set off. Google invented the foundation of modern AI — and could not hold the people who built it.

2017 Google & Google Brain — “Attention Is All You Need” 8 authors · 1 paper · the Transformer

Ashish Vaswani → Essential AI

CO-FOUNDERLead author; co-founded Adept, then Essential AI

Niki Parmar → Adept → Essential AI

CO-FOUNDERCo-founded Adept with Vaswani, then Essential AI

Noam Shazeer → Character.AI → Google

CO-FOUNDERFounded Character.AI; later returned to Google / DeepMind

Jakob Uszkoreit → Inceptive

CO-FOUNDERBiology / RNA design with deep learning

Llion Jones → Sakana AI

CO-FOUNDERLast of the eight to leave Google (Tokyo)

Aidan Gomez → Cohere

CO-FOUNDER · CEOWas an intern when the paper was written

Illia Polosukhin → NEAR Protocol

CO-FOUNDERLeft first; built a blockchain platform

Łukasz Kaiser → OpenAI

RESEARCHERJoined Google’s chief rival

Adept / Essential AI Founded elsewhere (Character.AI, NEAR) New labs (Inceptive, Sakana) Cohere OpenAI

The irony writes itself: the paper that made large language models possible was Google’s, yet seven of eight authors left to seed Cohere, Character.AI, Adept, Essential AI, Inceptive, Sakana, and NEAR — and one walked straight to OpenAI. The lab that invented the Transformer became the talent pool for the industry now challenging it.

SOURCE · NEURON MAKERS, CH. 22 “ATTENTION IS ALL YOU NEED” · author destinations as named in chapter & dossier 01