New Delhi, June 6 -- Eight years ago, Ashish Vaswani led a team of Google Brain researchers that invented the transformer, the magic sauce behind generative AI. The new model, which learns and generates human-like text, took the world by storm as it made its way into ChatGPT, and later, others like Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek.

India-born Vaswani, whose startup Essential AI works on building foundational models, now wants to establish an India team, access graphic processing units, find clients and spot a local strategic investment partner.

"We're building foundational AI models to automate coding and tasks in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) applications. The core idea is to build the best models in specific fields,...