The New Yorker:

Seven years after inventing the transformer—the “T” in ChatGPT—the researchers behind it are still grappling with its surprising power.

By Stephen Marche

In the spring of 2017, in a room on the second floor of Google’s Building 1965, a college intern named Aidan Gomez stretched out, exhausted. It was three in the morning, and Gomez and Ashish Vaswani, a scientist focussed on natural language processing, were working on their team’s contribution to the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, the biggest annual meeting in the field of artificial intelligence. Along with the rest of their eight-person group at Google, they had been pushing flat out for twelve weeks, sometimes sleeping in the office, on couches by a curtain that had a neuron-like pattern. They were nearing the finish line, but Gomez didn’t have the energy to go out to a bar and celebrate. He couldn’t have even if he’d wanted to: he was only twenty, too young to drink in the United States.

“This is going to be a huge deal,” Vaswani said.

“It’s just machine translation,” Gomez said, referring to the subfield of A.I.-driven translation software, at which their paper was aimed. “Isn’t this just what research is?”

“No, this is bigger,” Vaswani replied.

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