02 · Model Architectures

Transformer

The architecture behind modern AI

The dominant architecture for modern language models. Its attention mechanism lets the network weigh relationships among tokens efficiently, and its design trains in parallel better than older recurrent approaches. Other architectures and hybrids still exist.

Concrete example

Attention helps connect “it” with the most relevant earlier noun in a sentence, while other layers transform that contextual representation.

Why it matters

The 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need” introduced the Transformer architecture that underpins most modern LLMs.

Evidence

Sources for this definition

  1. 1
    Attention Is All You Need

    Vaswani et al. · Research · checked 2026-07-13