What is…
Transformer
The neural-network design (from Google, 2017) that nearly every modern AI model is built on.
The transformer is the architecture introduced in the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need." Its breakthrough was attention: letting every word in a passage look at every other word to figure out what matters, all in parallel. That made it possible to train on enormous datasets efficiently.
GPT literally stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Claude, Gemini, Llama and Grok are transformers too.
💡 Think of it like
Instead of reading a sentence one word at a time like a person, it reads the whole page at once and draws lines between the words that relate.
🧠 Test yourself
Which of these describes Transformer?
Related terms
Attention
The mechanism that lets a model weigh which earlier words matter most for the next one.
LLM (Large Language Model)
A model trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word — the engine behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok.
Parameters
The billions of internal numbers a model learns during training — its 'knowledge', stored as weights.
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