Technical Terms
Transformer
Definition
The neural network architecture that powers modern language models. Introduced in the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," transformers use a mechanism called self-attention to process relationships between all parts of the input simultaneously.
In Plain English
The breakthrough invention that made modern AI possible. Before transformers, AI read text word by word. Transformers can look at all the words at once and understand how they relate to each other — like reading a whole page instead of one word at a time.