Approaching its seventh anniversary, the "Attention" paper has attained legendary status. The authors started with a thriving and improving technology—a variety of AI called neural networks—and made it into something else: a digital system so powerful that its output can feel like the product of an alien intelligence.
Called transformers, this architecture is the not-so-secret sauce behind all those mind-blowing AI products, including ChatGPT and graphic generators such as Dall-E and Midjourney.
All eight authors have since left Google. Like millions of others, they are now working in some way with systems powered by what they created in 2017.
Steven Levy talked to the Transformer Eight to piece together the anatomy of a breakthrough, a gathering of human minds to create a machine that might well save the last word for itself.
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