Transformer
The design behind modern language AIs. The "T" in GPT.
In everyday terms
Introduced by Google researchers in 2017, transformers read a whole passage at once and work out which words relate to which. That made today's chatbots possible.
For professionals
Architecture built on self-attention and feed-forward layers, parallelisable across sequence positions. Scales efficiently on GPUs.
Think of it like…
Reading a whole page at a glance and drawing lines between related words, rather than reading one word at a time.
You've already seen it
GPT = Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
Myth vs reality
Myth: Transformers were invented for chatbots.
Reality: They were designed for translation. Chatbots came later.
Quick check
What does the "T" in GPT stand for?
- Text
- Transformer
- Training
- Token
Show answer
Transformer: Generative Pre-trained Transformer.