Transformer Architecture

What Is Transformer Architecture?

Introduced in the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," the Transformer architecture replaced RNNs and LSTMs as the dominant approach for language AI. Every major LLM (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama) is built on Transformers.

Key innovation: self-attention allows the model to weigh the importance of different words in a sentence relative to each other, enabling understanding of long-range dependencies and context.

For business leaders: you do not need to understand Transformer internals to use LLMs effectively. What matters is choosing the right model (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5) based on your cost, accuracy, and latency requirements.