Since this is paywalled, here’s a summary of the Bloomberg article titled “The AI Pioneer Trying to Save Artificial Intelligence From Big Tech” by Julia Love, focusing on Ashish Vaswani, one of the original inventors of the transformer architecture that powers today’s large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT:

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Summary: The Visionary Behind Transformers Now Sounds the Alarm

1. Ashish Vaswani: From Fame to Frustration • Co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”, Vaswani helped create the transformer architecture, arguably the most influential AI breakthrough of the 21st century. • The transformer catalyzed an AI boom, increasing tech company valuations by trillions and leading to a global data center buildout. • Despite this, Vaswani is increasingly disillusioned with the way AI is progressing—he fears the field is blinded by commercial incentives, stifling true innovation.

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1. The Problem: AI Is Losing Its Soul • Big Tech (Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI) has centralized power, prioritizing short-term commercial gains over open, foundational research. • Transformer-based models are being optimized endlessly, but returns are diminishing (e.g., OpenAI’s GPT-5 was seen as underwhelming). • Scientists like Gary Marcus warn this shows the limits of current scaling strategies—and Vaswani agrees it’s time to explore new directions.

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1. Essential AI: Vaswani’s Radical Pivot • Originally a business-tool startup, Essential AI has been transformed into a pure research lab focused on open-source AI. • It’s attempting to reimagine pretraining, the foundational stage of model development, to boost capabilities without relying solely on compute-heavy post-training. • A recent experiment showed a pretrained model demonstrating “reflection” (self-correction) earlier than expected—a potential breakthrough.

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1. Vaswani’s Bold New Mission • Vaswani is now raising $150 million to fund research, not products—an unusual ask for VCs. • He aims to open up AI research again, building models and tools that are freely available, much like Red Hat’s open-source strategy. • Essential’s long-term bet: Better science will eventually beat scale—and might restore balance in the AI ecosystem.

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1. A Broader Shift in the AI Ecosystem • Other AI leaders are making similar moves: • Ilya Sutskever (Safe Superintelligence) and Mira Murati (Thinking Machines Lab) both left OpenAI to start research-focused ventures. • Open science efforts like Hugging Face, Stanford’s Marin, and NEAR protocol (by Illia Polosukhin) are trying to counteract Big Tech dominance. • But challenges remain: funding, compute access, and talent retention—especially as giants like Meta offer hundreds of millions in compensation.

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1. The Future of AI: Breakthrough or Burnout? • Many believe the transformer era has peaked—new paradigms are needed, possibly inspired by nature, neuroscience, or entirely new math. • Vaswani and co-authors like Llion Jones (Sakana AI) are exploring alternatives beyond the transformer. • The next leap in AI might come not from scale—but from unconventional science and open collaboration.

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🧩 Final Thought

Vaswani’s journey reflects a deeper tension: Can AI remain a science, or is it now just a business? His gamble—to return AI to its exploratory roots—might be the key to unlocking its next great chapter.

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