# Niki Parmar

> Niki Parmar is an Indian AI researcher, co-author of the 2017 Transformer paper “Attention Is All You Need,” co-founder of Adept AI and Essential AI, and a member of technical staff at Anthropic. Her work has moved from Google search and self-attention research to startups building AI for software workflows and back to frontier research.

- **Role:** Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic
- **Organizations:** Anthropic, Essential AI, Adept AI Labs, Google Brain, Google Research
- **From:** Pune, India
- **Nationality:** Indian
- **Education:** Bachelor of Engineering, Pune Institute of Computer Technology, Master of Science in Computer Science, University of Southern California
- **Known for:** One of eight co-authors of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need.”, Lead author of the 2018 “Image Transformer” paper., Co-founder and former CTO of Adept AI Labs.

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Moved to the United States for graduate study at USC.
- **2015** — Joined Google, initially working on applied research for Search.
- **2017** — Co-authored “Attention Is All You Need,” introducing the Transformer architecture.
- **2018** — Led the “Image Transformer” paper extending self-attention to image generation.
- **2021** — Co-founded Adept AI Labs; publicly introduced the company in 2022.
- **2023** — Co-founded Essential AI with Ashish Vaswani; the company announced a $56.5 million Series A in December.
- **2024** — Received the NEC C&C Prize as one of the eight Transformer paper authors.
- **2024** — Joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff late in the year.
- **2025** — Discussed post-training research, AI reasoning data and her startup experience in an Economic Times interview.

## Achievements

- One of eight co-authors of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need.”
- Lead author of the 2018 “Image Transformer” paper.
- Co-founder and former CTO of Adept AI Labs.
- Co-founder of Essential AI.
- Member of the Transformer team honored with the 2024 NEC C&C Prize.
- Named to the Forbes India and Accel 2025 Indian AI leaders list.

## Latest updates

- **2025-06** — Forbes India and Accel listed her among 30 Indian AI leaders.
- **2025-03** — In an Economic Times interview, she discussed her work on post-training at Anthropic and the challenge of finding high-quality data for complex reasoning.
- **2024-12** — Joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff, according to Crunchbase and later interviews.

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikiparmar
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/nikiparmar09

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/niki-parmar
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29