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.