Transformers: The Architecture That Changed Everything

Before Transformers, we had RNNs and LSTMs, which were slow and had memory issues. Then the 'Attention is All You Need' paper dropped, and everything changed. I remember reading it and being blown away by the simplicity and elegance of the attention mechanism. Now, Transformers are used in NLP, Vision (ViT), and even for protein folding. Understanding how the self-attention mechanism works is one of those foundational things that opens up a huge part of modern ML. It’s worth the effort to study it.