![](//www.4rfv.com/images/no_image.jpg)
Of GTC's 900+ sessions, the most wildly popular was a conversation hosted by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang with seven of the authors of the legendary research paper that introduced the aptly named transformer - a neural network architecture that went on to change the deep learning landscape and enable today's era of generative AI.
Everything that we're enjoying today can be traced back to that moment, Huang said to a packed room with hundreds of attendees, who heard him speak with the authors of Attention Is All You Need.
Sharing the stage for the first time, the research luminaries reflected on the factors that led to their original paper, which has been cited more than 100,000 times since it was first published and presented at the NeurIPS AI conference. They also discussed their latest projects and offered insights into future directions for the field of generative AI.
While they started as Google researchers, the collaborators are now spread across the industry, most as founders of their own AI companies.
We have a whole industry that is grateful for the work that you guys did, Huang said.
From L to R: Lukasz Kaiser, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Jensen Huang, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani and Illia Polosukhin. Origins of the Transformer Model The research team initially sought to overcome the limitations of recurrent neural networks, or RNNs, which were then the state of the art for processing language data.
Noam Shazeer, cofounder and CEO of Character.AI, compared RNNs to the steam engine and transformers to the improved efficiency of internal combustion.
We could have done the industrial revolution on the steam engine, but it would just have been a pain, he said. Things went way, way better with internal combustion.
Now we're just waiting for the fusion, quipped Illia Polosukhin, cofounder of blockchain company NEAR Protocol.
The paper's title came from a realization that attention mechanisms - an element of neural networks that enable them to determine the relationship between different parts of input data - were the most critical component of their model's performance.
We had very recently started throwing bits of the model away, just to see how much worse it would get. And to our surprise it started getting better, said Llion Jones, cofounder and chief technology officer at Sakana AI.
Having a name as general as transformers spoke to the team's ambitions to build AI models that could process and transform every data type - including text, images, audio, tensors and biological data.
That North Star, it was there on day zero, and so it's been really exciting and gratifying to watch that come to fruition, said Aidan Gomez, cofounder and CEO of Cohere. We're actually seeing it happen now.
Packed house at the San Jose Convention Center. Envisioning the Road Ahead Adaptive computation, where a model adjusts how much computing power is used based on the complexity of a given problem, is a key factor the researchers see improving in future AI models.
It's really about spending the right amount of effort and ultimately energy on a given problem, said Jakob Uszkoreit, cofounder and CEO of biological software company Inceptive. You don't want to spend too much on a problem that's easy or too little on a problem that's hard.
A math problem like two plus two, for example, shouldn't be run through a trillion-parameter transformer model - it should run on a basic calculator, the group agreed.
They're also looking forward to the next generation of AI models.
I think the world needs something better than the transformer, said Gomez. I think all of us here hope it gets succeeded by something that will carry us to a new plateau of performance.
You don't want to miss these next 10 years, Huang said. Unbelievable new capabilities will be invented.
The conversation concluded with Huang presenting each researcher with a framed cover plate of the NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer, signed with the message, You transformed the world.
Jensen presents lead author Ashish Vaswani with a signed DGX-1 cover. There's still time to catch the session replay by registering for a virtual GTC pass - it's free.
To discover the latest in generative AI, watch Huang's GTC keynote address:
More from Nvidia
25/07/2024
Hey, you. You're finally awake.
It's the summer of Elder Scrolls - whe...
24/07/2024
AI is set to transform the workforce - and the Georgia Institute of Technology's new AI Makerspace is helping tens of thousands of students get ahead of the...
24/07/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and showcases new hardware, softwa...
23/07/2024
Generative AI applications have little, or sometimes negative, value without acc...
23/07/2024
Businesses seeking to harness the power of AI need customized models tailored to their specific industry needs.
NVIDIA AI Foundry is a service that enables ent...
22/07/2024
AI and accelerated computing - twin engines NVIDIA continuously improves - are d...
22/07/2024
Team NVIDIA has triumphed at the Amazon KDD Cup 2024, securing first place Friday across all five competition tracks.
The team - consisting of NVIDIANs Ahmet E...
19/07/2024
Research published earlier this month in the science journal Nature used NVIDIA-powered supercomputers to validate a pathway toward the commercialization of qua...
19/07/2024
Research published earlier this month in the science journal Nature used NVIDIA-powered supercomputers to validate a pathway toward the commercialization of qua...
19/07/2024
AI has seen unprecedented growth - spurring the need for new training and educat...
19/07/2024
Research published earlier this month in the science journal Nature used NVIDIA-powered supercomputers to validate a pathway toward the commercialization of qua...
18/07/2024
Mistral AI and NVIDIA today released a new state-of-the-art language model, Mist...
18/07/2024
It's time for a sweet treat - the GeForce NOW Summer Sale offers high-perfor...
17/07/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and showcases new hardware, softwa...
16/07/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of our In the NVIDIA Studio series, which c...
15/07/2024
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wil...
12/07/2024
NVIDIA is taking an array of advancements in rendering, simulation and generativ...
11/07/2024
Unlock new experiences every GFN Thursday. Whether post-apocalyptic survival adventures, narrative-driven games or vast, open worlds, GeForce NOW always has som...
11/07/2024
Enhancing Japan's AI sovereignty and strengthening its research and development capabilities, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science ...
10/07/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible and showcases new hardware, softwar...
10/07/2024
Improved cancer diagnostics - and improved patient outcomes - could be among the...
09/07/2024
Sphere, a new kind of entertainment medium in Las Vegas, is joining the ranks of legendary circular performance spaces such as the Roman Colosseum and Shakespea...
08/07/2024
Artificial intelligence is transforming the transportation industry, helping dri...
04/07/2024
GeForce NOW is bringing 22 new games to members this month.
Dive into the four titles available to stream on the cloud gaming service this week to stay cool an...
03/07/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and showcases new hardware, softwa...
28/06/2024
On a weekday afternoon, Ashwini Ashtankar sat on the bank of the Doodhpathri River, in a valley nestled in the Himalayas. Taking a deep breath, she noticed that...
27/06/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on ...
27/06/2024
Get ready to feel some chills, even amid the summer heat. Capcom's award-winning Resident Evil Village brings a touch of horror to the cloud this GFN Thursd...
26/06/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and showcases new hardware, softwa...
26/06/2024
Roblox is a colorful online platform that aims to reimagine the way that people ...
25/06/2024
Generative AI has revolutionized software development with prompt-based code generation - protein design is next.
EvolutionaryScale today announced the release...
24/06/2024
Multi-die chips, known as three-dimensional integrated circuits, or 3D-ICs, represent a revolutionary step in semiconductor design. The chips are vertically sta...
20/06/2024
Sit back and settle in for some epic storytelling. Tell Me Why and As Dusk Falls - award-winning, narrative-driven games from Xbox Studios - add to the 1,900+ g...
19/06/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible and showcases new hardware, softwar...
18/06/2024
The electric grid and the utilities managing it have an important role to play in the next industrial revolution that's being driven by AI and accelerated c...
17/06/2024
NVIDIA contributed the largest ever indoor synthetic dataset to the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference's annual AI City Challenge - h...
17/06/2024
Making moves to accelerate self-driving car development, NVIDIA was today named an Autonomous Grand Challenge winner at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognit...
17/06/2024
NVIDIA researchers are at the forefront of the rapidly advancing field of visual...
15/06/2024
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang on Friday encouraged Caltech graduates to pu...
14/06/2024
When she was five years old, Veronica Miller (n e Teklai) and her family left their homeland of Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa, to escape an ongoing war with Et...
14/06/2024
NVIDIA today announced Nemotron-4 340B, a family of open models that developers ...
13/06/2024
Set sail for adventure, pirates. Sea of Thieves makes waves in the cloud this week. It's an adventure-filled GFN Thursday with four new games joining the Ge...
12/06/2024
Accelerated computing is transforming data processing and analytics for enterpri...
12/06/2024
The full-stack NVIDIA accelerated computing platform has once again demonstrated...
12/06/2024
Let's talk about NeRFs - no, not the neon-colored foam dart blasters, but ne...
12/06/2024
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and showcases new hardware, softwa...
07/06/2024
Across industries, AI is supercharging innovation with machine-powered computation. In finance, bankers are using AI to detect fraud more quickly and keep accou...
06/06/2024
Capcom's latest entry in the iconic Street Fighter series, Street Fighter 6, punches its way into the cloud this GFN Thursday. The game, along with Ubisoft&...
05/06/2024
India's AI market is expected to be massive. Yotta Data Services is setting its sights on supercharging it. In this episode of NVIDIA's AI Podcast, Suni...
05/06/2024
NVIDIA launched NVIDIA Studio at COMPUTEX in 2019. Five years and more than 500 ...