A Brief History of GPT Through Papers

The development of powerful language models like GPT is traced back through key research papers, beginning with Alan Turing's "imitation game." The pivotal breakthrough was the Transformer architecture, introduced in the 2017 paper "Attention is all you need." This architecture's main innovation was removing recurrent neural networks and relying solely on the attention mechanism, which had been introduced in a 2014 paper on machine translation. This simplification allowed for massive parallelization and scalability during training. The article highlights how this shift from recurrence to pure attention was the quantum leap that ultimately led to models like ChatGPT.