Transformer Co-Author Niki Parmar Joins Anthropic After Founding Two AI Startups

Niki Parmar, a former Google AI researcher and co-author of the groundbreaking “Attention Is All You Need” paper, has joined Anthropic.

Parmar announced her move on X, stating, “Today is as good a day as any to share that I joined Anthropic last Dec :) Claude 3.7 is a remarkable model at complex tasks, especially coding, and I’m thrilled to have contributed to its development. From winning Pokémon badges to vibes coding, Claude’s got you covered!”

Parmar joined Google Research in 2015 as part of Google Brain, where she played a key role in developing the Transformer architecture—a foundation for modern AI models, including ChatGPT.

She left Google in 2021 to co-found Adept AI Labs, a startup focused on general intelligence. Later, she co-founded Essential AI alongside Ashish Vaswani. Emerging from stealth in December 2023 with backing from Google, NVIDIA, and AMD, Essential AI raised nearly $65 million to develop large language model (LLM)-powered tools for automating business workflows and improving productivity.

Parmar’s journey in AI began at the Pune Institute of Computer Technology in India. Despite not securing admission to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), she pursued her passion by taking online courses from AI pioneers Andrew Ng and Peter Norvig. She later earned a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

Meanwhile, Anthropic has released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its latest AI model, and Claude Code, an agentic coding tool available in a limited research preview. The company, in its blog post, mentioned that Claude 3.7 Sonnet is “the first hybrid reasoning model on the market” and allows users to choose between near-instant responses and extended, step-by-step reasoning.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is available across all Claude plans, including Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise, and through Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. Extended thinking mode is not included in the free tier. The pricing remains unchanged from previous models at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, which includes thinking tokens.

Anthropic describes Claude 3.7 Sonnet as “both an ordinary LLM and a reasoning model in one.” Users can decide when the model should generate a quick response or engage in a deeper reasoning process.