Humans and AI Will Understand Each Other Better Than Ever

Artificial intelligence has promised much, but there has been something holding it back from being used successfully by billions of people: a frustrating struggle for humans and machines to understand one another in natural language. This is now changing, thanks to the arrival of large language models powered by transformer architectures, one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past 20 years. Transformers are neural networks designed to model sequential data and generate a prediction of what should come next in a series. Core to their success is the idea of "attention," which allows the transformer to "attend" to the most salient features of an input rather than trying to process everything. These new models have delivered significant improvements to applications using natural language like language translation, summarization, information retrieval, and, most important, text generation.