In 2017, Google researchers published “Attention Is All You Need”; they were solving translation, but accidentally laid the foundation for today’s AI age

Google Translate once struggled with long sentences because its software processed language one word at a time. This sequential reading approach created severe computational bottlenecks, slowing down translation and causing models to lose context by the time they reached the end of a paragraph. Computer scientists solved this limitation by abandoning step-by-step reading entirely. Their Transformer architecture analyzed full blocks of text simultaneously using self-attention.