In 2017 a Google team published "Attention Is All You Need," presenting the Transformer architecture: a sequence-processing model based exclusively on attention mechanisms, without the recurrent networks that had dominated language processing until then. The advantage was twofold: better performance on translation and other language tasks, and full parallelization during training — allowing scaling to sizes previously impossible. The Transformer is the underlying architecture of all modern large language models: GPT, BERT, LLaMA, Gemini, Claude. It is the AI equivalent of what von Neumann architecture was for general computing.