Niki Parmar

Niki Parmar is a prominent AI researcher and entrepreneur who has made significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. She is currently the Co-Founder of Essential AI, a startup backed by Google, Nvidia, and AMD that aims to develop enterprise-focused AI products.23

Professional Background

Parmar is best known for co-authoring the groundbreaking "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which introduced the Transformer architecture that became fundamental to modern AI systems like ChatGPT.25 Prior to founding Essential AI, she was:

• Co-Founder and CTO at Adept AI Labs (November 2021 - November 2022)
• Research Assistant at the Computational Social Science Lab, USC
• Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon
• Software Engineer at PubMatic4

Career Highlights

• Co-authored the influential Transformer research paper in 2017 while at Google Brain12
• Currently leading Essential AI, which raised $56.5 million in Series A funding3
• Aims to develop large language model (LLM) products that enhance workplace productivity3

Personal Journey

Coming from a lower-middle-class family in Pune, India, Parmar is a self-taught coder who overcame early challenges, including not getting into the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). She became the youngest and only non-PhD member of Google's AI research team at 24.5

Her current work at Essential AI focuses on creating AI tools that help businesses work more efficiently, with a vision of deepening human-computer collaboration.3