What is a Transformer?

Transformer is a neural network architecture that has fundamentally changed the approach to Artificial Intelligence. Transformer was first introduced in the seminal paper "Attention is All You Need" in 2017 and has since become the go-to architecture for deep learning models, powering text-generative models like OpenAI's GPT , Meta's Llama , and Google's Gemini . Beyond text, Transformer is also applied in audio generation , image recognition , protein structure prediction , and even game playing , demonstrating its versatility across numerous domains.

Fundamentally, text-generative Transformer models operate on the principle of next-token prediction : given a text prompt from the user, what is the most probable next token (a word or part of a word) that will follow this input?…