Transformers & attention People

Noam Shazeer is an AI researcher who co-wrote the Transformer paper and was first author of the paper on sparsely gated mixture-of-experts layers. He co-founded Character.AI, returned to Google in 2024, and announced a move to OpenAI in 2026.

Llion Jones is one of the eight authors of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" and a co-founder and CTO of Sakana AI.

Aidan Gomez is a Canadian computer scientist, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, and one of the eight authors of the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture.

Ashish Vaswani is a computer scientist best known as the first-listed author of “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. He also co-founded the AI companies Adept and Essential AI.

Niki Parmar is one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need", the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, and is named in Google's own account of that work.

Jakob Uszkoreit is one of the eight authors of “Attention Is All You Need” and the founder of Inceptive, a company using AI to design biological molecules.[^1][^4]

Illia Polosukhin is one of the eight authors of the 2017 Transformer paper and a co-founder of NEAR Protocol. A 2024 NEAR post identifies him as CEO of the NEAR Foundation.[^1][^3][^6]

Thomas Wolf is a co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, and the first author of the 2019 paper that introduced the company's open-source Transformers library to researchers and practitioners.

Jacob Devlin is a research scientist and first author of BERT, a language model Google introduced in 2018 that reads text in both directions. He earlier worked on neural machine translation at Microsoft Research.