Transformer

Attention is all you need

The Transformer (Vaswani et al. 2017) powers GPT, Claude, BERT, and nearly all modern AI. Its key innovation: self-attention — every part of the input looks at every other part simultaneously instead of processing left-to-right.

📖 In "The animal didn't cross the street because it was tired", your brain connects "it" to "animal". Self-attention does exactly that — jumps directly between related words regardless of distance.