Yes, remember back there in 2020/2021 when OpenAI created the gpt2? How about we really focus on what enable them to do that? google transformers.

The modern generative AI industry was built on one of the most consequential papers in the history of software: Google’s 2017 paper, Attention Is All You Need .

That paper introduced the Transformer architecture.

And without that architecture, GPT-2 does not happen in the way we know it.

Honestly, most of today’s AI industry does not happen in the same way either.

This is one of those moments where the industry narrative got flattened.

People remember products, brand names, launches, demos, APIs, and valuation charts.

But under all of that sits a technical shift that changed what was economically and architecturally possible.

That shift was the Transformer.

The pre-Transformer world was not useless, but it was narrower

Before Transformers took over, the field was already making real progress with recurrent neural networks, LSTMs, GRUs,…