About Niki Parmar
Niki Parmar is a pioneering AI researcher and entrepreneur, best known as a co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which introduced the Transformer model foundational to modern AI systems like ChatGPT. She has held significant roles at Google Brain and co-founded two prominent AI startups, Adept AI Labs (where she was CTO) and Essential AI. Currently, she serves as a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, focusing on frontier capabilities and RL research.
Education
Master's Degree
Master's Degree - Computer Science
Bachelor of Engineering (BE)
Bachelor of Engineering (BE) - Information Technology
Work Experience
Member of Technical Staff
Leading RL research on hard exploration tasks, frontier capabilities and test-time scaling
Co-Founder
Co-Founder
Co-Founder and CTO at Adept
Started and Co-founded Adept AI where the vision was to build useful and intelligent models that can take actions with tools in your browser on behalf of users.
Staff Research Scientist
Core contributor of the “Attention Is All You Need” paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762) that invented the Transformer model. I also led scaling transformer models and extended it to other AI problems like Image Generation(https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.05751) and Computer Vision(https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05909). Transformer based models can write news articles, poetry, emails, translate one language into another, and even answer questions. It has also been used in code generation, protein folding, speech recognition and many other AI models like ChatGPT, GPT3, AlphaStar, AlphaFold, Co-Pilot, Dall-e etc.
Launched some of the first successful deep learning based AI models for Question Answering and Text similarity for Google Search.
Senior Research Scientist
Senior Research Scientist
Senior Research Engineer
Senior Research Engineer
Research Software Engineer
Deep Learning research for language understanding and vision (images, videos)
Research in Deep Learning for Machine Translation, Images and other generation methods.
Software Engineer III
Research in Deep Learning for Machine Translation, Images and other generation methods.
Software Engineer
Research in Deep Learning for Machine Translation, Images and other generation methods.
Previously worked in Natural language understanding for sentence similarity and question answering systems using end to end deep learning methods.
Research Assistant
https://cssl.usc.edu
▪ Social media analysis to determine how moral content in social media text can predict real-world behavioral phenomena like group dynamics, decision making and culture
▪ Analyzed twitter data during government shutdown (Nov’13) to predict the social distance between users, their rate of activity and the influence each user has on the twitter network. Visualized network structure to show difference in moral values.
▪ Developed a NLP suite to implement algorithms like z-label LDA, clustering, classifiers and social media data extractor.
Software Development Engineer Intern
▪ Part of the Global Action Trace - Distributed Computing team under the E-commerce Platform Services.
▪ Tracking dependency changes for any service in Amazon over time to report changes in call patterns like new or removed dependencies. Tracking volume of calls between services, to report causes of discrepancy or latency issues in the call chains.
▪ Processing was done in a distributed environment to make it scalable to manage millions of service calls made in an hour.
Database Specialist
▪ Performance tuning of database using query optimization techniques. Processing student data to generate survey reports and cleaning up redundant data using normalization.
Software Engineer
▪ Part of the AdServer team responsible for Online AdServing for publishers in real time across display, mobile and video. Included the end to end ad serving process, requesting bids, sending the optimal ad and gathering stats all in realtime.
▪ Worked on designing and implementing video ad serving for publishers supporting video inventory.
▪ Used Hadoop (Map Reduce) to aggregate pixel and audience data stats and writing it to MySQL. Also, worked on predicting the mobile ad price from Ad networks using different parameters like device, os, time, location, etc.
Key Career Achievements
Co-authored the seminal 'Attention Is All You Need' paper, introducing the Transformer architecture which underpins modern AI systems like ChatGPT, GPT-3, and AlphaFold.
Co-founded two significant AI startups, Adept AI (as CTO and Co-Founder) and Essential AI (Co-Founder, securing $8.0M in initial funding).
Recognized as the youngest and only non-PhD researcher on the Google Brain team at the time, leading key initiatives in scaling and extending Transformer models.
Launched highly successful deep learning-based AI models for Question Answering and Text Similarity systems for Google Search.
Core Competencies
Expertise in foundational AI research, deep learning model architecture, and developing scalable enterprise AI solutions.
Deep Learning
Machine Learning
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Generation
Algorithms
Python
Java
C++
JavaScript
Spring
Shell Scripting
Hadoop
MapReduce
Big Data
SQL
NoSQL
Linux
Git
JavaServer Pages (JSP)
HTML 5
CSS
AJAX
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