--- title: The Paper That Created Modern AI | daily.dev description: The story behind the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' written by eight Google researchers originally trying to improve Google Translate. It explains how... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-paper-that-created-modern-ai-0tfr8tpyz twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Paper That Created Modern AI | daily.dev og:description: The story behind the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' written by eight Google researchers originally trying to improve Google Translate. It explains how... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-paper-that-created-modern-ai-0tfr8tpyz og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/0Tfr8tPyZ.png og:image:alt: The Paper That Created Modern AI og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Paper That Created Modern AI **[freeCodeCamp](https://daily.dev/sources/freecodecamp)** · 8 min read · 7 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary The story behind the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' written by eight Google researchers originally trying to improve Google Translate. It explains how old recurrent, word-by-word language models were slow and forgetful, and how isolating the 'attention' mechanism into the Transformer architecture allowed models to process entire sentences in parallel, enabling massive scaling. The Transformer became the foundation for GPT, Gemini, Claude, and nearly every major modern AI system. All eight authors later left Google to found or join companies like Cohere, Character AI, OpenAI, Adept, Essential AI, and Sakana AI. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What problem did the Transformer architecture solve compared to recurrent neural networks? It removed the need to process text sequentially one word at a time. Recurrent networks read left to right, causing early context to fade by the end of long sentences and forcing each step to wait for the previous one, which made training slow and impossible to parallelize. The Transformer's attention mechanism let models process every word simultaneously and determine which other words to focus on, enabling massive parallelization and scaling. _Developers tracking why modern models scale so well can follow deeper explainers on daily.dev._ ### Who wrote the Attention Is All You Need paper and what happened to them afterward? Eight Google researchers wrote it, including Jacob Uszkoreit, who proposed isolating the attention mechanism and named the architecture Transformer, and Noam Shazeer, who turned the idea into a working system. All eight later left Google to found or join companies including Cohere, Character AI, OpenAI, Adept, Essential AI, and Sakana AI, effectively creating Google's biggest AI competitors. _Anyone curious how foundational research talent reshapes the AI industry can dig deeper via daily.dev._ ### What does the T in GPT and ChatGPT stand for? It stands for Transformer, referring to Generative Pre-trained Transformer, the architecture introduced in the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need. This same architecture underlies most major AI systems today, including GPT-4, Gemini, Llama, image generation models, code-writing models, and protein structure prediction systems. _Developers piecing together how today's AI models relate can explore related coverage on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Paper That Created Modern AI: The Story Behind the Transformer](https://daily.dev/posts/the-paper-that-created-modern-ai-the-story-behind-the-transformer-ottnd8r0s) · freeCodeCamp · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Self-Attention: The Innovation That Changed AI](https://daily.dev/posts/self-attention-the-innovation-that-changed-ai-x8tcpysf8) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Fundamentals of AI: Inside the transformer](https://daily.dev/posts/fundamentals-of-ai-inside-the-transformer-szwloqlw1) · Cisco · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#google](https://daily.dev/tags/google), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#deep-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/deep-learning) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-paper-that-created-modern-ai-0tfr8tpyz) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The Paper That Created Modern AI","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-paper-that-created-modern-ai-0tfr8tpyz","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-paper-that-created-modern-ai-0tfr8tpyz"},"datePublished":"2026-08-21T11:02:55.118Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T07:18:36.670Z","description":"The story behind the 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need,' written by eight Google researchers originally trying to improve Google Translate. 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