Last updated: January 8, 2023

Attention is All You Need was published by Google researchers in 2017 and has been widely cited as a groundbreaking work in the field of deep learning. The authors introduced a new type of neural network architecture called the Transformer, which has since been the basis of breakthroughs like GPT-3 and DALL-E.

Seven of the eight authors left Google, and six of them started their own ventures. This trend of top machine learning researchers leaving large companies to start their own ventures is not unique to Google. A number of top researchers from companies like Meta and Microsoft left to start their own companies as well.

So where are the authors now (in January 2023)? Here's where they're at:

• Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar co-founded Adept.ai

• Noam Shazeer founded Character.AI

• Jakob Uszkoreit co-founded Inceptive

• Illia Polosukhin co-founded Pagoda

• Aidan N. Gomez co-founded Cohere.ai

• Lukasz Kaiser - Unknown (a cached version of LinkedIn search results showed him working at OpenAI)

• Llion Jones - Still at Google! 🏆

It's important to note that research is built upon the work of others. For example, some might claim that Semi-supervised Sequence Learning is the real OG. So, while it's fun to see the specific authors of a particular paper and where they go after publishing their work, it's important to recognize that their research is just one part of a larger body of knowledge.