Niki Parmar
Niki Parmar is an AI researcher and entrepreneur best known as one of the eight co-authors of Attention Is All You Need, the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture now underlying most of modern large language models.
Early life and path into AI
Whilst an engineering student at the Pune Institute of Computer Technology, Parmar became interested in AI and ML after taking massive open online courses (MOOCs) from Andrew Ng and Peter Norvig. She went on to earn a Master's Degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where she delved into social science questions with ML and big data. Parmar joined Google Research in 2015 and worked as a software engineer for just over two years, before moving into deeper research. Notably, she was recognized as the youngest and only non-PhD researcher on the Google Brain team at the time, a fact she has cited as proof that curiosity can outpace credentials.
The Transformer
At Google Brain, working alongside Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, and others, Parmar helped design a model built entirely on Self-attention, abandoning Recurrence and Convolutions altogether. The paper proposed a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Her contributions extended the idea well beyond text: she helped build Image Transformer for pixel-level generation, explored attention-based vision models such as BoTNet, and co-authored Tensor2Tensor and Mesh-TensorFlow for large-scale Neural machine translation and multi-task learning.
After Google
Parmar later co-founded Adept AI as CTO, pursuing "action models" that operate software on a user's behalf, then co-founded Essential AI to build enterprise-focused language systems. She has since joined Anthropic as a researcher working on reinforcement learning and frontier model capabilities. As one collaborator put it, "There would be no ChatGPT without the T in it, which stands for 'transformers,' which is the research Niki was a part of."