Meet Transformers: The Google Breakthrough that Rewrote AI’s Roadmap [Video]

In the summer of 2017, a group of Google Brain researchers quietly published a paper that would forever change the trajectory of artificial intelligence. Titled “Attention Is All You Need,” this academic publication didn’t arrive with splashy keynotes or frontpage news. Instead, it debuted at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, a technical gathering where cutting-edge ideas often simmer for years before they reach the mainstream.

Few outside the AI research community knew it at the time, but this paper would lay the groundwork for nearly every major generative AI model you’ve heard of today from OpenAI’s GPT to Meta’s LLaMA variants, BERT, Claude, Bard, you name it.

The Transformer is an innovative neural network architecture that sweeps away the old assumptions of sequence processing. Instead of linear, step-by-step processing, the Transformer embraces a parallelizable mechanism, anchored in a technique known as self-attention. Over a matter of months, the Transformer revolutionized how machines …