# Transformers Explained: The Discovery That Changed AI Forever

**Author:** Ankit Gupta
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/N3-transformers-explained-the-discovery-that-changed-ai-forever
**YouTube ID:** JZLZQVmfGn8

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Nearly every modern AI model, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini and Grok, is built on the same foundation: the
Transformer.

In this video, YC's Ankit Gupta traces how AI learned to understand language — from early RNNs and LSTMs to attention
mechanisms and the breakthrough 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need — the discovery that unlocked the modern AI era.

