The Evolution of the Transformer Architecture

In 2017, a groundbreaking research paper titled "Attention Is All You Need" introduced the Transformer architecture, forever changing the course of artificial intelligence. This article takes a look back at this seminal work and traces the evolution of the Transformer. We will break down the key innovation of the self-attention mechanism, explaining how it allowed models to process language with a more nuanced understanding of context. We will then follow the lineage of models built on this architecture, from the original Transformer to modern titans like GPT and Gemini, highlighting the profound and lasting impact of this one revolutionary idea.