transformer

noun

1. Something that transforms, changing its own or another thing's shape.
2. A static device that transfers electric energy from one circuit to another by magnetic coupling; primarily used to transfer energy between different voltage levels, which allows the most appropriate voltages for power generation, transmission and distribution to be chosen separately.

   “While initial reports Thursday traced the glow to a transformer explosion or a fire, Mr. McGee said there was no fire, and there were no transformers involved.”

3. A neural network architecture composed of layers of attention which takes sequences of tokens (representing text, images, audio, or other modalities) as input.

   “Transformer is a deep machine learning model based on the encoder–decoder network architecture and is used primarily in the field of NLP.”

   “The transformer helped machine-learning systems improve at a much faster pace, leading directly to last year’s release of ChatGPT and the attendant boom in interest around AI. (Transformers are the “T” in ChatGPT.)”

   “Privately, many at Google have bristled at criticism of its AI credentials, in particular given that it incubated the underlying technology and released it publicly in the 2017 transformers paper.”

4. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of Transformer.