Niki Parmar

Niki Parmar is an Indian computer scientist and entrepreneur who contributed to the research underlying modern language models. She earned a master's degree in computer science at the University of Southern California in 2015. Her subsequent work at Google involved neural-network research and the development of methods for processing complex information.

Parmar was a co-author of Attention Is All You Need, the 2017 paper introducing the Transformer. The architecture became a foundation for a large body of later language-model work. Her contribution belongs to a collaborative research effort, rather than to a single-person account of the invention of modern generative AI.

Her research also included the Image Transformer, which applied attention-based approaches to image generation. This direction explored whether methods associated with sequences could help models represent visual information. It provides a concrete example of her technical work beyond the original Transformer paper and its later use in text systems.

Parmar subsequently co-founded Adept and Essential AI with collaborators including Ashish Vaswani. These ventures connected research with efforts to develop useful AI systems for people and organizations. Her career spans architectural work, experiments across modalities, and the practical responsibilities of building research-driven companies around new machine-learning capabilities.