Women in AI
Niki Parmar
Co-author of 'Attention Is All You Need'
Niki Parmar is one of the most consequential yet underrecognized figures in the history of artificial intelligence. She was a co-author of the landmark 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' published while she was at Google Brain. This paper introduced the Transformer architecture — the foundational technology behind virtually all modern AI systems, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, and DALL-E.
After Google, Parmar co-founded Adept, an AI company building AI agents that can take actions on computers — essentially AI systems that can use software the way humans do. She announced Adept in 2022 with co-founder David Luan.
Parmar subsequently joined Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude, where she continues to work on advancing AI capabilities. Her career trajectory — from co-inventing the Transformer at Google to co-founding an AI startup to joining one of the leading frontier AI labs — reflects her central role in shaping the modern AI landscape.
The Transformer paper she co-authored has been cited over 130,000 times and is widely considered one of the most important computer science papers ever published.
