In 2016, Niki Parmar had no PhD, no formal research title, and no one asking her to co-author what would become the most cited AI paper of the 21st century.
At Google, a small research team was trying to figure out how to make AI understand language faster. They had a radical idea: what if AI could read an entire sentence at once, instead of one word at a time?
Niki wasn't supposed to be central to that effort. The youngest on her team, she was a software engineer from Pune, India who had first learned AI through free online courses in college.