Alumni of Google Brain · Mountain View

The Transformer Eight

Six of the eight Google authors of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017), the paper behind today's language models, went on to found companies.

6alumni startups
6named on Labspie
7founders
$7.8bnin unicorn valuations
Character.AINoam ShazeerCohereAidan GomezSakana AILlion JonesEssential AIAshish Vaswani, Niki ParmarInceptiveJakob UszkoreitNEAR ProtocolIllia PolosukhinGoogle Brain

The companies

CompanyFounded by (Google Brain alumni)FieldBased inValuation
Character.AI
Conversational AI characters.
Noam ShazeerAIMenlo Park, United States$1bn
Cohere
Enterprise language models and retrieval.
Aidan GomezAIToronto, Canada$6.8bn
Sakana AI
Nature-inspired research into model building.
Llion JonesAITokyo, Japan–
Essential AI
Open models for enterprise work.
Ashish Vaswani, Niki ParmarAISan Francisco, United States–
Inceptive
Deep learning to design RNA medicines.
Jakob UszkoreitHealthPalo Alto, United States–
NEAR Protocol
Blockchain platform for AI-era applications.
Illia PolosukhinFintechZug, Switzerland–

Sources

More mafias

Alumni of PayPal

PayPal Mafia

The original startup mafia. Early PayPal staff went on to found or fund LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, SpaceX and Palantir.

TeslaSpaceXLinkedInYouTubeYelpPalantir+2
10 founders named8 startups
Alumni of OpenAI$1.03tn in unicorns

OpenAI Mafia

Researchers and leaders who left OpenAI have started several of the most valuable AI labs of the decade.

AnthropicSafe SuperintelligenceThinking Machines LabPerplexityAdeptCovariant+2
19 founders named8 startups
Alumni of Google DeepMind$19.1bn in unicorns

DeepMind Mafia

London's deepest bench of AI talent. DeepMind alumni now run labs in London, Paris, New York and the Bay Area.

Inflection AIMistral AIIsomorphic LabsLatent LabsIneffable IntelligenceH Company+2
11 founders named8 startups