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The Transformer

A Google paper, "Attention Is All You Need", introduces the Transformer — the architecture that scales to today's large language models.

2017AI

In 2017, researchers at Google published "Attention Is All You Need," introducing the Transformer — a neural network architecture built around the attention mechanism (explored hands-on in Educatifu's AI track).

Why it mattered

Earlier language models processed text one step at a time, which was slow and struggled with long-range context. The Transformer let a model attend to every part of its input at once, in parallel — which turned out to scale astonishingly well with more data and compute. Every major large language model since is a Transformer at heart. It is the most recent hinge point on this timeline, and the reason the AI of the 2020s looks the way it does.

Sources

  1. [1]Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017)arxiv.org
  2. [2]Transformer (deep learning architecture) — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

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