This Wired article tells the story behind the development of the “Transformer,“ a revolutionary AI architecture that powers modern language models like ChatGPT. A team of eight Google researchers developed the Transformer in 2017, based on the concept of attention. The team worked hard to complete the paper before an important conference deadline, and their breakthrough was initially overlooked by Google’s leadership. The Transformer has since become a foundational technology, and the researchers have gone on to start successful AI companies of their own.