Transformer (original)

Google · 2017 · Architecture · USA

A to Z

A · App: No
B · Built By: Google
C · CEO & Politics: Sundar Pichai — Centrist / historically bipartisan
D · Date: 2017
E · Expertise: Intermediate+
F · Free Tier: Yes
G · Generates: Text only
H · Deployment: Cloud + Local (open weights)
I · Inputs: Text
J · Jurisdiction: USA
K · Key Staffers: Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist), Sundar Pichai (CEO Alphabet)
L · Languages: English-primary
M · Model Type: Architecture
N · Safety Issues: None reported
O · Open Source: Yes — open weights
P · Pricing: Free (open source, Apache 2.0)
Q · AIDb Rating: 6/10 · AIDb v2.0 (rule-based): Capability 6/10 · Currency 2/10 · Access 9/10 · Significance 10/10 → 6.25
R · What Makes It Special: The Transformer from Google's 2017 paper 'Attention Is All You Need', a sequence-to-sequence architecture based solely on attention, with no recurrence or convolutions; it set new machine-translation records (28.4 BLEU on WMT 2014 English-German, 41.8 on English-French after 3.5 days on eight GPUs) while being more parallelizable and far cheaper to train, and also worked for English constituency parsing.
S · Stock / Status: $344 (GOOGL, Sep 25, 2026)
T · Training Cutoff: [UNKNOWN]
U · Users: [UNKNOWN]
V · Voice Chat: No
W · Weights: Downloadable
X · X Handle: @Google
Y · Year Founded: [UNKNOWN]
Z · Bottom Line: Open-weights Architecture from Google, released 2017.

Data completeness 88% · Last verified 2026-05-12 · Primary source ↗

“Transformer (original).” AIDb — The AI Database. Verified 2026-05-12. https://theaidatabase.com/m/transformer-original.html