Transformer Paper Authors at AI Startup Debut Open Source Model

Essential AI Labs, a startup founded by two authors of the seminal Transformer paper, unveiled its first model, seeking to boost US open-source efforts at a time when Chinese players are dominating that segment of artificial intelligence.

The model called Rnj-1, named after the famed mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, is built and trained from scratch, the company said in a post online. It claims to deliver “frontier matching” coding, math and agentic reasoning capabilities, despite using only 8 billion parameters, compared with OpenAI’s trillion-parameter size.