Tracing the Foundations of Natural Language Processing and the Impact of the Transformer

The transformer architecture is a key advancement that underpins most modern generative language models. Since its introduction in 2017, it has become a fundamental part of natural language processing (NLP), enabling models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) and Claude to advance text generation capabilities significantly. A deep understanding of the transformer architecture is crucial for grasping the mechanics of modern large language models (LLMs).

In the previous chapter, we explored generative modeling techniques, including generative adversarial networks (GANs), diffusion models, and autoregressive (AR) transformers. We discussed how Transformers can be leveraged to generate images from text. However, transformers are more than just one generative approach among many; they form the basis for nearly all state-of-the-art generative language models.

In this chapter, we...