The one innovation that supercharged AI: Best ideas of the century

The most powerful artificial intelligence tools all have one thing in common. Today's most powerful AI tools - the ones that can summarise documents, generate artwork, write poetry or predict how incredibly complex proteins fold - all stand on the shoulders of the "transformer" . This neural network architecture, first announced in 2017 at an unassuming conference centre in California, enables machines to process information in a way that reflects how humans think. Previously, most state-of-the-art AI models relied on a technique called a recurrent neural network . This worked by reading text in tight windows, left to right, remembering only what came just before.