The Frontier Ladies of AI

When one talks of technology, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI), the names that come to mind are mostly male— Sam Altman or Larry Ellison or Sundar Pichai. That’s because both systemic barriers and cultural biases hold women back from entering the field and succeeding in it. It is in this context that the success of women technologists or AI startup founders should be seen. Many of them let their work do most of the talking. Regard­less, they have left an indelible mark in AI and also compete successfully with their male counterparts to create cutting-edge technologies and to make them more user-friendly.

In many parts of the world, patriarchal social conditioning holds young girls back from pursuing maths or science, which are considered boys’ subjects. Female students in STEM fields often find themselves a minority in university classrooms, lead­ing to social isolation and unwelcoming educational environ­ments. Studies have shown that women in STEM professions earn less than their male counterparts and often face gender bias in hiring and even harassment. This—along with a lack of female role models—can be discouraging and leads to higher attrition. The barriers persist even for entrepreneurs: technol­ogy startups led by women receive only a tiny slice of the equity pie. According to the World Economic Forum, women-founded startups accounted for only 2 per cent or less of venture capi­tal funding invested in Europe and the US in 2023.

Yet, many women have not only broken the proverbial glass ceiling in the segment, but have also led pioneering research that has humanised and modernised AI. Among such luminaries from across the world—like Dr Fei-Fei Li or Mira Murati—are a bunch of Indian-origin wizards who have achieved breakthroughs as well as steered innovation through their startups.

For instance, Niki Parmar, who is in her 30s and was born to a middle-class family in Pune, has excelled herself both as a researcher and an innovator, starting with her trailblazing work in Google. She is credited with being the core contributor of the seminal 2017 paper ‘Attention Is All You Need’, which introduced the “Transformer” architecture used in building generative AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Bard, and others.

“This innovation revolutionised AI by replacing sequential data processing with self-attention, allowing language models to analyse vast amounts of text in parallel,” notes the Bengaluru-based AI expert and author Sreejith Sreedharan, while adding, “This breakthrough led to unprecedented efficiency and scal­ability, laying the foundation for today’s most advanced AI systems.” The Transformer’s impact is far-reaching, powering everyday applications from machine translation and search en­gines to real-time text generation. It allows AI to grasp context and meaning more effectively across vast datasets.

An alumnus of the Pune Institute of Computer Technology, Parmar was not dejected when she failed to secure admission to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Instead, she chose to work harder: along with her studies, she took online courses from Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng and AI expert Peter Norvig during her undergrad days. Lat­er, she earned a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern Califor­nia. She soon went on to work at Google Research, before trying her hand at entrepreneurship. She co-founded Adept AI Labs in 2021, Essential AI in 2023 (which was backed by Google, Nvidia and AMD). Most recent­ly, she joined Anthropic, an AI research company. Her specific achievements are in the areas of creating models and tools that help businesses work smarter.

For a researcher and innovator who has taken a non-tradition­al route to success and glory, she was the lone non-PhD member of Google’s AI research team when she joined them aged 24. Parmar, who grew up in a modest home in Maharashtra, had often talked about the uncertainties she had faced early on in life, including troubles in getting a student loan for her studies in the US.

Parmar refused to be content with her pathbreaking re­search and decided to push the boundaries and become an AI startup founder, not once, but twice. On February 25 this year, when Anthropic launched the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, Parmar announced her involvement through a post on X, “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! ”

That the origin of the large language model wave started with the research in which Parmar played the pivotal role means that the Pune girl has very few contenders for being the queen of AI in India.

In truth, there is no dearth of bright young female minds in AI. Bindu Reddy, an alumnus of IIT Bombay and Dartmouth College, is CEO and co-found­er of the San Francisco-based Abacus.ai, which specialises in AI-powered enterprises solutions. This former head of product for Google Apps is per­haps the most visible among women AI technologists. It appears as though her words are treated like gold dust by AI watchers as well as industry analysts. The Indian-origin AI hotshot posts frequent com­ments on X offering her take on technology trends and products by AI majors so routinely that her posts are akin to an open university for AI enthusiasts and learners.

She is also sharp and witty. When Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world, she posted on X, “The compa­ny that sells shovels in a gold rush has made it again!!” Prior to launching Abacus.ai, she was general manager for AI Verticals at Amazon Web Services. She had also been the CEO and co-founder of Post Intelligence, a deep-learning company that created servic­es for social media influencers before it was snapped up by Uber.

Reddy’s work in AI has been nothing short of phenom­enal. So is her role as a commentator. Sample this social me­dia post: “Without Chinese companies AI research and open source would be dead! Humanity would be ruled by a bunch of oligarchs and monopolies. Super glad that we have different countries and systems.” When OpenAI recently launched its GPT-4.5 model, she commented after trying it out, “GPT-4.5 is an excellent philosopher.” Here is another, a forecast: “I will put my money where my mouth is, we will make it dead easy for non-techies to launch apps, websites and complex AI agents! We will go one step further and launch an AI engineer bench­mark that can’t be gamed. The goal—automate 15% of all tasks done by software engineers today.”

Reddy feels that quick advances in AI will change all the rules of engagement and even the role of the bright­est of engineers. She posts, “We are living in a very weird period in history. Engineers have become superhuman 10x engineers by applying AI. In a couple of years, AI will replace these superhuman engineers. Strange to go from being su­perhuman to being replaced.” When she is not poking fun at Elon Musk for his chainsaw posturing and dwelling on the Ukraine war, she finds time to praise Alibaba’s newest video generator for being open-source and uncensored.

Again, among seasoned AI hands employing new tech­nologies to save lives, there is an Indian flavour. An alumnus of Delhi Public School, RK Puram and Stanford University, the Darjeeling-born Suchi Saria uses AI, in which she has a PhD, in healthcare. She describes herself as an “innovator in healthcare” who deploys AI so­lutions for improving patient outcomes and reducing costs. As founding research director at the Malone Center for Engi­neering in Healthcare at Johns Hopkins, she created an AI tool that cut the risk of sepsis-related deaths by 20 per cent. This followed a tragic death in the family: losing her 26-year-old nephew to sepsis. Accord­ing to scientific journals, her AI tool detects sepsis six hours faster than other existing methods. Simultaneously, she is also CEO and founder, and chief scientific officer, at Bayesian Health, which offers AI tools to help hospitals spot high-risk patients.

A report in Time magazine said about her startup and its meth­ods, “Some 2.5 million people in the US develop a pressure injury, or bedsore, in hospitals every year. Bayesian’s platform uses AI to analyse electronic medical records and identify patients at risk of developing pressure ulcers, allowing for preventative care.” Writ­ing on the Bayesian Health website, Saria notes, “Over the last five years, I’ve received handwritten letters from patients and their families. These letters have fuelled my desire to keep pushing harder to bring Bayesian’s technology to the bedside.”

The list of awards and accolades she has won is aplenty. She had been recognised as a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, and she is a recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award. Saria has been a Sloan Research Fellow and was earlier listed on MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Un­der 35. The New York-based Saria, 41, is also a co-founder of the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) which offers guidelines for the responsible use of AI in healthcare.

Another Indian-origin AI genius, Anima Anandkumar is le­veraging AI to tackle global challenges more efficiently. Her work includes accelerating prediction models for extreme weather and advancing sustainable nuclear fusion simulations. The My­sore-born IIT Madras alumnus played a key role in developing FourCastNet, the first AI-based high-resolution weather model, which outperforms traditional systems in speed and accuracy, particularly for extreme events like heat waves and hurricanes.

Speaking at a TIME100 AI Impact Award ceremony in Dubai last month, Anandkumar—who is the Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology and former AI research director at Nvidia—highlighted her 2022 collabora­tion with Nvidia, Caltech, AWS and other institutions. A former IBM Fellow at Cornell University, she emphasised the broader potential of neural operators in solving complex scientific problems, from improving drones and rockets to designing sustainable nuclear reactors and medical devices. “To me, this is just the beginning,” she said.

Local efforts, too, deserve praise.

Ritwika Chowdhury, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, took the conventional route to realising her goals, starting off as the technical head of the Kharagpur Data Analytics Group before landing in Intel Labs as a research scientist. She posted on X, “Luck is often unnoticed hard work.” Her own hard work paid off and she got her turn to found her own company whose aim was to make video production smoother and faster. Thus was born Unscript, a Bengaluru-based AI company that helps businesses create studio-quality videos effortlessly. Her aim, Chowdhury says in her interviews to the media, was to democ­ratise video creation for businesses in marketing campaigns at scale directly from text prompts. It also helps enterprises to dub and translate videos into multiple languages, according to the company website. It advertises itself as “your one-stop for enterprise video solutions, powered by cutting-edge generative AI.” Chowdhury, the company CEO, takes pride in “reducing” video production time from weeks to minutes at an affordable cost. Her company was among 80 companies selected to take part in the Amazon Web Services AI Accelerator.

She has a message to the world as she plans to forge ahead with other AI initiatives: “Artificial Intelligence is not just a trend; it’s a revolution. Embrace it, learn it, and lead the change because that’s the future.”

Anima AnandkumarBindu ReddyNiki ParmarRitwika ChowdhurySuchi Sariawomen entrepreneurswomen issue 2025