Transformers: The Discovery That Sparked the AI Revolution

Y Combinator Startup Podcast

2025/10/23

Overview Shownote Highlights Transcript Chapters Pins

Shownote

Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the Transformer.In this video, YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language — from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention mechanisms and ...

Highlights

The rise of modern artificial intelligence has been propelled by a fundamental shift in how machines understand human language. While earlier models struggled with the complexities of sequence processing, a new architectural breakthrough changed the course of AI development—ushering in an era defined by speed, scalability, and unprecedented linguistic understanding.

03:35

Attention allowed the decoder to attend to the encoder's hidden states, enabling better alignment of input and output.

06:45

The Transformer architecture eliminated recurrence through self-attention, enabling full parallelization during training.

08:11

Training autoregressive models on large datasets led to emergent general intelligence in LLMs

Chapters

How did AI overcome the limits of early language models?

00:00

What made attention the game-changer in machine translation?

02:50

Why did Transformers replace RNNs and redefine AI architecture?

05:21

How do today’s LLMs turn architecture into real-world intelligence?

08:11

Transcript

Ankit Gupta: Nearly every state-of-the-art AI system, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok, is built on the same underlying model architecture, the transformer. But where did the transformer architecture come from? And what can its development tea...