91. The Transformer Architecture: The Invention That Changed AI (opens in new tab)

In 2017, Google published a paper called "Attention Is All You Need." Before it, NLP was dominated by RNNs and LSTMs. They processed text word by word, left to right. They had memory problems. They were slow to train. They forgot long-range context. The transformer threw all of that out. No recurrence. No convolutions. Just attention. And it worked better than everything before it, trained faster on GPUs, and scaled in ways nobody expected. GPT, BERT, T5, LLaMA, Claude, ChatGPT. All of them a...