Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 transformers and the “Attention is all we need” paper?
The &quot;Attention is All You Need&quot; paper introduced a new way for AI to read and understand language, much like how we might read a comic book.<p>As you read each panel of a comic book, you don&#x27;t just look at the words in the speech bubbles, but you also pay attention to who&#x27;s talking, what they&#x27;re doing, and what happened in the previous panels. You might pay more attention to some parts than others. This is sort of like what the Transformer model does with text.<p>When the Transformer reads a sentence, it doesn&#x27;t just look at one word at a time. It looks at all the words at once, and figures out which ones are most important to understand each other. This is called &quot;attention.&quot; For example, in the sentence &quot;The cat, which is black, sat on the mat,&quot; the Transformer model would understand that &quot;cat&quot; is connected to &quot;black&quot; and &quot;sat on the mat.&quot;<p>The &quot;attention&quot; part is very helpful because, like in a comic book, understanding one part of a sentence often depends on understanding other parts. This makes the Transformer model really good at understanding and generating language.<p>Also, because the Transformer pays attention to all parts of the sentence at the same time, it can be faster than other models that read one word at a time. This is like being able to read a whole page of your comic book at once, instead of having to read each panel one by one.