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Time of India
17-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
We would like to be DeepSeek in the West, says Essential AI cofounder
Dearth of collaborative efforts in AI domain may widen inequality around these capabilities even as pressures to monetise AI models which are 'difficult to ignore' may eventually lead companies to prioritise less on a long-term focus in research, said Ashish Vaswani , CEO and cofounder at Essential AI , a San Francisco-based AI startup. Vaswani, who earlier worked as a research scientist at Google Brain, is known for his pioneering contributions to the field of deep learning. In 2017, he co-authored the seminal paper 'Attention is All You Need' that broke new ground by introducing the transformer architecture which forms the foundation of generative AI applications like ChatGPT and its successors. Vaswani later cofounded Adept AI labs with another co-author Niki Parmar, before co-founding Essential AI with Parmar in 2023. The startup, backed by the likes of Google, Nvidia and AMD, builds full-stack AI solutions that enhance efficiency for automating labour-intensive and repetitive work. Its mission is to 'deepen the partnership between humans and computers.' Over the last few years, billions of dollars have been spent on scaling AI models, with less to show in terms of return on investments. Speaking to ET during this visit to India, Vaswani said this could impact AI research. 'There are several instances of companies shuttering the longer-term R&D efforts in interest of pouring all the resources into the money-making aspects, especially at a time of distress,' he said. According to him, the onus is on the leadership to ensure healthy long-term bets in addition to building a sustainable business. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories Further, in the pursuit of leadership in the AI arms race, companies are running the risk of ignoring important ideas. 'Any race forces you to take existing ideas that work, and pour resources into it to scale it up, while ignoring other riskier, and alternative but faster paths,' Vaswani noted. Lack of transparency A lack of openness, unlike earlier, is hindering the advancement of ideas, according to Vaswani. 'In 2017, there were many labs that could produce revolutionary ideas, and models are just an artifact of that spirit. It is never a single innovation but a series that comes together and then gives you these nonlinear improvements. The chance of that being widely shared is lower today,' he said. The end goal of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) too is narrowing people's view, according to Vaswani. AGI is the stated aim of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI , for instance. 'I don't think of AGI as much as a state of progression, like growth in capabilities or intelligence growth. I don't think there is an end to these progressions,' said Vaswani. Need for open-source At Essential AI, therefore, the team is building an open science or open-source frontier model that everybody can control, said Vaswani. He explained that the idea is to put their work on frontier models out in the open so that others can build on them. This would include opening up its weights, and even to a certain extent data that they are using for training, he added. 'I think this is a strategic imperative because the point when we are able to reach the same level in the domains we care about, which is frontier, companies will trust our model more because they can see the process,' he said. On generating returns on investments from using open-source models, Vaswani said, 'I would not say it is trivial to make money as a closed-source model today, either - they are spending a lot of money, right?' He sees a growing market 'Having spoken with potential future collaborators and customers, they would love to use an open-source model in collaboration with us. I think there are business opportunities. I don't want to cast this moniker on us. But, in the short term, we would like to be the DeepSeek in the West,' he said, referring to the Chinese AI startup which rapidly gained prominence for developing high-performing and cost-efficient large language models.
Time of India
08-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
India to be a global AI powerhouse: OpenAI executive after India academy launch
ChatGPT developer OpenAI and the IndiaAI Mission on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding to launch the US-based company's educational platform, OpenAI Academy , to promote artificial intelligence skills in India. This makes it the first international rollout of OpenAI's online learning platform. India has the second largest user base for ChatGPT. 'The (AI) tools and the latest development frameworks should be available to all the startups and researchers so that new apps can be developed, new solutions can be created at population scale,' union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in a virtual message at the launch in New Delhi. The initiative is expected to further strengthen India's resolve to democratise technology and contribute to the IndiaAI Mission, he said. The mission, which is also supporting the building of Indian foundational models, is receiving interest to do so from the likes of Essential AI cofounder Ashish Vaswani and Two AI founder Pranav Mistry, an official said on the sidelines of the event. Live Events Both are Indian-origin computer scientists and entrepreneurs in the US. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories The takeaway is that the IndiaAI Mission is attracting talent and entrepreneurs back to India, the official said. OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon said India is becoming a 'global AI powerhouse', and understands that maximising AI's benefits requires significant investments in core infrastructure and cultivating AI talent. 'By leading in these areas and empowering people to harness frontier intelligence, India can accelerate that growth and discover scientific breakthroughs and develop solutions to some of society's hardest challenges,' Kwon said. India's vast and growing pool of AI talent, vibrant entrepreneurial spirit and strong government support to expand critical infrastructure mean the country is poised to succeed in all areas of the AI stack, he added. 'As demand for AI professionals is expected to reach 1 million by 2026, there's a significant opportunity and a need to expand AI skills, development and make sure people from every part of India can participate and benefit,' Kwon said. Through the partnership, OpenAI will contribute educational content and resources to IndiaAI's 'future skills' platform and to the iGOT Karmayogi civil servant capacity building platform. It will also provide up to $100,000 worth of API credits to 50 IndiaAI Mission-approved fellows and startups. 'I am sure with this partnership, we will be able to strengthen our educational ecosystem, we will be able to empower all our students, we will be able to support our entrepreneurs and our engineers in building state-of-the-art AI applications and models,' IndiaAI Mission chief executive Abhishek Singh said. OpenAI will help train a million teachers in the use of generative AI . It will also conduct hackathons in seven states to reach 25,000 students and webinars and workshops delivered by its domain experts and partners in six cities, the company said.
Mint
06-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
The transformer birthed GenAI. Meet the man who built it
Eight years ago, Ashish Vaswani led a team of Google Brain researchers that invented the transformer, the magic sauce behind generative AI. The new model, which learns and generates human-like text, took the world by storm as it made its way into ChatGPT, and later, others like Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek. 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. 'We're 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. 'Could have never imagined it' In June 2017, Vaswani led a Stanford University research funded under Google Brain, floating the transformer model now regarded as one of the world's most significant inventions in computer science—alongside the likes of Frank Rosenblatt's neural networks, and Sergey Brin-Larry Page's PageRank. 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 'could have never imagined it." 'What 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." Also read | Generative AI, data centres to define India's tech industries in 2025 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—a 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. Fundraise GenAI burst into prominence when Sam Altman-led OpenAI, a Silicon Valley peer of Vaswani's, unveiled ChatGPT in November 2022. Since then, AI has become a household term, catapulting the field into prominence well beyond engineers and researchers. 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. 'The results of our early foundational models are here, and they look good. We'll be using these results as a reference point for our next fundraise," he said. As part of this move, Vaswani is open to interest from Indian strategic partners as well. 'India has some of the brightest minds, and it is absolutely important that India pursues building its own AI. There's no reason why foundational work in AI cannot happen in India," he said. Read this | Mint Explainer: What OpenAI o1 'reasoning' model means for the future of generative AI 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. Foundational AI 'One 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's still early days, but the scope for foundational work remains broader in the US, than what Indian startups have so far created," Daniel added. 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. 'I 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. And this | India's generative AI startups look beyond building ChatGPT-like models Foundational AI, to be sure, is seen as a tough to crack since it requires firms to build and train their own algorithms from scratch. While the advantages include the ability to have a proprietary AI model that squarely targets a specific use case, doing so requires significant working capital, a key challenge in India. Capability questions Vaswani, felicitated as one of India's 30 leading minds in AI by Accel in Bengaluru on Wednesday, is based in San Francisco. While Essential AI is headed by Vaswani and Parmar, the core team is in the US, highlighting the country's lack of focus on core engineering driven by access to capital being much lower than in the US. 'This is certainly an issue, and core engineering capability continues to lag in India. This is one key factor that we're also looking for in startups, but a lot of work happening here goes amiss in terms of core foundational work. Strategic companies doing foundational work will be key to progress in the field," added Prayank Swaroop, AI investor and partner in Accel. Vaswani, however, said the evolution of GenAI likely has to do a lot with philosophy, alongside computer science and mathematics. 'Is computer science more mathematics or philosophy? It is perhaps both. Steve Jobs was the first person to articulate that successful products are a blend of technology, the liberal arts and philosophy. This is what can lead to us doing visionary work. Eventually, we're building the philosophy of how the world should be. The ethos behind technology is to solve problems, and that's the only job of innovation," he said. And read | Gen AI pushes global firms to pour money into hardware upgrades
Hans India
29-05-2025
- Business
- Hans India
Accel's high-impact AI summit in Bengaluru to spotlight India's emerging global edge
Bengaluru: Global venture capital firm Accel on Thursday said it will host the second edition of its flagship AI Summit in Bengaluru on June 4, convening some of the sharpest minds in artificial intelligence from India and beyond. Under the theme 'Engineering India's AI Advantage,' the exclusive, invite-only event will bring together leading AI founders, researchers, tech CXOs, policymakers, and global investors. The goal is to catalyse new ideas, partnerships, and frameworks that accelerate India's role in shaping the global AI landscape. India's AI market is projected to reach $17 billion by 2027, growing at over 25 per cent CAGR, according to Nasscom. With unique data advantages and a growing base of vertical AI startups, Indian innovation is increasingly setting the pace across sectors such as healthcare, fintech and retail. 'India's AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly, with application-layer AI now delivering real value to enterprises,' said Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel. 'Founders are leveraging India's data advantage to build differentiated, domain-specific models. This summit is about spotlighting that momentum and building the frameworks to scale global AI companies from India,' he added. Featured speakers include Ashish Vaswani (Co-founder and CEO, Essential AI), Abhishek Singh (Additional Secretary, MeitY), Professor Balaraman Ravindran (IIT Madras), Geetha Manjunath (Founder and CEO, Health Analytix), Kalika Bali (Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India), Pratyush Kumar (Co-founder, Sarvam AI), Pranav Mistry (Founder and CEO, TWO AI), Sharad Sanghi (CEO, Neysa), and Vas Natarajan (Partner, Accel), among others. The evening will also see the unveiling of the inaugural Forbes x Accel AI 30 list — recognising Indian-origin trailblazers in AI across research, entrepreneurship, and enterprise impact.
