Speech

What's a Transformer? Understanding the Innovation That Changed Artificial Intelligence

Collin Flynn

April 20, 2024

About the talk

"Transformer" is a very generic name for a specific machine learning architecture, first published in a paper titled "Attention Is All You Need".Transformers were conceived to handle text translation, but are surprisingly effective in other (non-text) domains. What was the key innovation that set transformers apart from previous methods?In this talk we'll look at embeddings, gradient decent, loss functions, and how Transformers learn to pick up on conversational context using matrix multiplication. We'll also take a look at a newer architecture called "Mamba", and how it improved upon some of weaknesses of Transformers.

Presented by

Collin Flynn

Principal Software Engineer

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Collin Flynn

About Livefront

Livefront is a digital product consultancy. We're trusted by some of the world's most admired companies to drive strategy, design, and engineering for their core digital experiences. They partner with us to move faster, think bigger, and design products people love.