Eight Google researchers published "Attention Is All You Need," proposing a new architecture they called the Transformer. Dispensing with recurrence and convolution entirely and handling sequences through attention alone, it beat prior approaches on two machine translation tasks while being far more parallelizable and much faster to train. The authors were Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. Conceived to improve translation, the architecture became the shared foundation of GPT, BERT, and essentially every large language model since — the single most consequential paper in the history of generative AI, and one whose publication by Google made its competitors' rise possible. In the years that followed, nearly all eight authors left Google to found or join AI companies of their own.