Jakob Uszkoreit is a computer scientist who was one of the eight authors of “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer. He had worked at Google on machine translation and was among the team members who pushed the idea that attention alone, without recurrence or convolution, could drive sequence modeling. The Transformer that resulted became the backbone of nearly every modern large language model.
In 2021 Uszkoreit left Google as part of a broader departure of researchers from the company’s AI ranks. He co-founded Inceptive, a biotechnology startup that applies deep learning to RNA, designing messenger-RNA molecules for vaccines and therapeutics. The company represents a bet that the same modeling ideas behind language models can be turned on the “language” of biology.
Why business readers should care: Uszkoreit is another of the Transformer authors who turned a research breakthrough into a company - in his case outside of language entirely, in drug discovery. His path shows how foundational AI methods are now being applied far beyond chatbots, into fields such as biotechnology.