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:
Most recent headlines
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
KPop Demon Hunters Stars Visit Berklee for Weeklong Celebration Andrew Choi and EJAE, who voiced the film's main characters and contributed to its soundtr...
16/12/2025
Hawkins has landed on Spotify, just in time for Stranger Things Season 5, Volume...
16/12/2025
Wherever you are, your favorite music and audio content should go seamlessly with you. That's why Spotify has partnered with NAVER Corp, Korea's leading...
16/12/2025
2025 Wrapped arrived bigger and bolder than ever. This year's experience is designed to be ultra personal and shareable, with new features like Wrapped Part...
16/12/2025
Three 12-kilowatt Advanced Electric Propulsion System thrusters, supplied by L3Harris Technologies, form the core of Gateway's propulsion system. Pictured i...
16/12/2025
The challenge facing America's defense industrial base is not just about speed - its about rebuilding the foundation that makes speed possible. Our nations ...
16/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
16/12/2025
SEVILLE, Spain Canal Sur, the public broadcasting service for Andalusia, Spain, has completed a total technology refresh based on Pebble's resilient, softwa...
16/12/2025
NEW YORK Teleprompting hardware provider Telescript International has acquired all software code and intellectual property previously owned by Telescript West. ...
16/12/2025
As cable operators face increased competition from 5G fixed wireless access providers, a new report from Ookla Research finds that T-Mobile is the FWA speed lea...
16/12/2025
Apple has announced a major upgrade to the Apple TV app for device owners outside the Apple ecosystem with news that the Apple TV app for Android now supports G...
16/12/2025
Space42 grows Direct-to-Device partner ecosystem through a Memorandum of Underst...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON Announces Release Date for Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 R...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON's Kyivstar Invests in Renewable Energy in Ukraine with Acq...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Emma Appleton, Fares Fares, Frida Gustavsson and Jakob Oftebro...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Docu-reality My Korean Boyfriend Gets a Trailer and Premiere D...
16/12/2025
Harmonic's XOS Advanced Media Processor Improves Streaming Video Quality and Boosts Viewer Engagement SAN JOSE, Calif. - Dec. 16, 2025 - Harmonic (NASDAQ: ...
16/12/2025
RT Sport Awards 2025 live on RT One and RT Player at 8:05pm on Saturday 20 December.
On Saturday 20 December live on RT One and RT Player at the earlier t...
16/12/2025
Singer -songwriter Brian Kennedy has been announced as the final celebrity dance...
15/12/2025
Harlem Globetrotters Celebrate 100th Anniversary With New Brand Campaign From Th...
15/12/2025
Top L-R: La Tierra Del Valor (The Home of the Brave), Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawe...
15/12/2025
L3Harris will leverage 15 years of experience supporting the E-4B Nightwatch and...
15/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the loss of federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and operational changes, the statewide pub...
15/12/2025
BOULDER, Colo. Public Media Venture Group (PMVG), Venture Technologies Group (VTG), and WQED have completed a multipart agreement that they say will significant...
15/12/2025
Cape Town, November 13, 2025 - SES and International artist and humanitarian, Fo...
15/12/2025
Luxembourg, December 15, 2025 - SES, a leading space solutions company, and Abra Group launched fast and reliable multi-orbit inflight connectivity service on t...
15/12/2025
How Rivian s Design Puts Drivers First-And Why That Matters Published on Dec 15, 2025 Categories: Business Solutions
LinkedIn Corporate Communications
Sha...
15/12/2025
Space42 and Cobham Satcom completed the full range of advanced terminals for the...
15/12/2025
15 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan Delivers First Starlink Direct to Cel...
15/12/2025
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor finds himself the topic of year's cracker jokes
Oasis, David Harbour, Celebrity Traitors and Angela Rayner all feature in this y...
15/12/2025
Comscore Expands Cross-Platform Campaign Measurement to Include Audio and Social New capabilities strengthen cross-platform campaign reporting suite; CCR rebran...
15/12/2025
NVIDIA today announced it has acquired SchedMD - the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) ...
15/12/2025
RT .ie has reached one billion page views this year and is on track to finish 2025 2% ahead of last year. Average time spent on the site is up 3% on 2024, with ...
15/12/2025
Modern workflows showcase the endless possibilities of generative and agentic AI on PCs.
Of many, some examples include tuning a chatbot to handle product-supp...
13/12/2025
Powering Client Growth: Horizon Deepens Nielsen Partnership, Enabling More Effic...
13/12/2025
In a move that will help it offer more flexible and less costly programming options, YouTube TV has announced that it will be launching YouTube TV Plans with mo...
13/12/2025
SINGAPORE Magna Systems has designed, built and completed what is believed to be the first full UHD and IP-based OB truck in Southeast Asia for a Singapore medi...
12/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Everything You Need to Know for Next Week's Big Sho...
12/12/2025
Hailey Gates at the Atropia premiere (photo by George Pimentel / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)...
12/12/2025
Last month, Spotify announced a new collaboration with the ATP Tour, the global governing body of men's professional tennis, aimed at bringing the next gene...
12/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the elimination of Federal federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and changes in the way they...
12/12/2025
Wisycom and DPA Microphones announce the appointment of Ren Moerch as Group Product Director, Wireless, a strategic leadership role that will guide the combine...
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.
