How Transformers Work

Full transcript

Welcome, class! Today we explore the transformer, the architecture powering modern AI. Imagine a sentence entering a machine that reads every word simultaneously, not one by one, understanding context through powerful mathematical relationships called attention. Inside, the transformer uses self-attention: each word asks every other word, 'how relevant are you to me?' This creates weighted connections, allowing the model to capture meaning, grammar, and context across the entire sentence instantly. Through layers of attention and feed-forward networks, the transformer builds deep understanding, then generates accurate predictions or translations. That, class, is how transformers power today's remarkable language models!