In 2016, Google engineer Illia Polosukhin had lunch with a colleague, Jacob Uszkoreit. Polosukhin had been frustrated by a lack of progress in his project, using AI to provide useful answers to questions posed by users, and Uszkoreit suggested he try a technique he had been brainstorming that he called self-attention. Thus began an 8-person collaboration that ultimately resulted in a 2017 paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the concept of transformers as a way to superchar...