Google announced that it had deployed Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) at production scale, replacing phrase-based statistical translation with a system that reads and translates a whole sentence at once, starting with Chinese to English. Errors dropped substantially and the gap to human translation narrowed. It was one of the first cases where hundreds of millions of everyday users could feel the difference deep learning made, spreading the sense that AI was becoming genuinely useful. The same line of research led directly to the Transformer paper the following year.