A handful of companies control the production, pace, and flow of advanced AI technologies. They get to decide how AI evolves and who benefits from its transformative power. With most frontier AI research remaining hidden, we face a future where the very tools that could uplift humanity are confined within a few corporate walls.

This stands in stark contrast to decades of open AI collaboration and the centuries-old scientific tradition where shared knowledge drives progress. When foundational AI work is kept proprietary, this not only slows its own development but also impedes its power to accelerate breakthroughs across all other domains of human inquiry.

We have no time to waste in tackling humanity's most pressing challenges – such as advancing medicine, democratizing education, and designing specialized hardware for AI – and we cannot afford to let closed AI development prevent us from exploring these new frontiers.

Training a frontier model takes more than compute: it requires deep expertise in scaling laws, data, optimization, architectures, and evaluation. Yet most "open" models today release weights without sharing vital details. Without this understanding, true reproducibility is out of reach. Researchers waste time and compute retracing steps that could have been openly shared.

Essential AI is building an open platform to fuel and accelerate AI breakthroughs globally. Our open models, robust tooling, reproducible pipelines, and evaluation frameworks are designed for collaboration and contribution, empowering others to build, iterate, and innovate faster.

Essential AI's technology and products have the means to shape AI advancements while supporting scalable and sustainable business models. Powerful AIs don't trace their origins to singular breakthroughs, but from an amalgam of improvements, incremental and large. Essential AI creates the ideal environment to catalyze these advancements, enabling a steady path to sustained frontier capabilities.

We achieve this by harnessing a vast collection of intellect and energy to tackle AI's hardest problems, ultimately setting a pace of advancement that closed organizations cannot match. By translating research into openly available models and artifacts, and by sharing significant findings through papers and blog posts – we accelerate breakthroughs, drive broader adoption and usage, attract more minds to the collaborative ecosystem, and reinforce the virtuous cycle. This is how we build with the world's builders to accelerate research.

Our Focus Areas

In the near term, we will be carefully placing our bets on a few high-conviction areas:

• Long context capabilities and applications

• Modeling behaviors of computer programs

• Time-varying and space-varying modalities

• Low-level performance optimization on newer accelerator families

We expect to share major advancements in the areas of software engineering and STEM capabilities. We are going after capabilities like long-context code automation with whole-repo refactoring, and kernel optimizations on next-generation accelerators.

Our core team combines deep ambition with proven technical skills. Our CEO, Dr. Ashish Vaswani, brings both world-class technical experience and a long-standing commitment to research that serves the world, not just a few companies.

Our collective accomplishments include publishing at top conferences, co-inventing foundational AI technologies, and advancing state-of-the-art large-scale distributed systems. Our diverse backgrounds span the world's top universities – including Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkeley – and leading research labs like Google Brain, alongside elite engineering environments such as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and notable startups.

Together, we work hard to maintain a culture that drives foundational research. With truth-seeking and rigorous application of fundamentals, we continuously push the limits of what's possible.