Niki Parmar is an Indian-American computer scientist and AI researcher. She is renowned as one of the co-authors of the foundational 2017 research paper, "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the Transformer architecture and changed the trajectory of modern natural language processing and generative AI.
Education and Career at Google Brain
Parmar earned her Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Pune Institute of Computer Technology (PICT), India, and subsequently completed her Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2015. She joined Google Brain in 2015, focusing on neural network architectures, machine translation, and deep learning.
The Transformer Breakthrough
At Google Brain, Parmar worked on the translation model that became the Transformer. Her contributions to the parallel processing capabilities and optimization of self-attention were vital to making the model practical for massive datasets. The architecture she co-created has enabled the scaling of neural networks to hundreds of billions of parameters.
Post-Google Ventures
In 2021, Parmar left Google to co-found Adept AI, focusing on developing useful AI assistants that interact directly with web interfaces. Later, she co-founded Essential AI with Ashish Vaswani to build specialized models that automate complex workflows for businesses.
