From RNA therapeutics to a Web3 software development toolkit to LLM and NLP tools, the high-profile researchers turned founders are tackling a wide array of problems and raising a ton of capital. We break down the profiles of each founder and their companies.
In 2017, Google researchers published “Attention Is All You Need.” The paper introduced a new neural network architecture called the “Transformer” that could better understand and generate human language.
The paper was influential because it set a new standard for language understanding and paved the way for further research and development in this field. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, likely benefited from this research by incorporating the Transformer architecture into their own language models, such as GPT-4, which is one of the largest and most powerful language models ever created.
The Transformer paper was a major breakthrough in the field of natural language processing, and it helped to enable more advanced language models like the ones being developed by OpenAI.
So it’s no surprise that 6 out of the 8 researchers behind this paper have gone on to found companies and raise significant financing, often at large valuations.
Here is a summary of the companies and their total raised along with profiles of the respective authors turned founders, all taken from CB Insights.
