Overview
Introduced in the paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' the Transformer architecture revolutionized NLP by allowing models to process entire sequences of text simultaneously rather than word-by-word.
Key Innovation: Self-Attention
The attention mechanism allows the model to weigh the importance of different words in a sentence relative to each other, regardless of their distance.
Impact
Transformers are the core technology behind GPT, Claude, Llama, and almost all state-of-the-art language models.