Google Researchers Behind Revolutionary AI Architecture Depart to Launch Startups
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A group of 8 Google researchers invented the transformer architecture that powers AI systems like ChatGPT. Their seminal 2017 paper has become legendary.
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The breakthrough began when Jakob Uszkoreit proposed the idea of "self-attention," allowing AI systems to understand language more like humans do.
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Noam Shazeer provided critical refinements that took the transformers to a new level of performance on translation tasks.
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Though initially seen as just another AI paper within Google, the authors realized transformers could power AI across modalities like text, images, audio and video.
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All 8 researchers have since left Google to found startups based on transformers, as Google was slow to productize the technology at scale.