The Transformer, the Engine Inside Every Modern Model

Paper: Attention Is All You Need (2017)

If you read only one paper in this whole collection, make it this one. The Transformer is the design that made GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and every other modern model possible. The title is a small joke that turned out to be true: the authors threw away the complicated machinery everyone was using and kept just one idea, called attention, and it worked better than anything before it.