A powerful AI breakthrough is about to transform the world

First announced in a 2017 paper, the transformer paved the way for OpenAI to launch ChatGPT two years ago

- Christopher Mims

The AI revolution is about to spread way beyond chatbots. From new plastic-eating bacteria and new cancer cures to autonomous helper robots and self-driving cars, the generative-AI technology that gained prominence as the engine of ChatGPT is poised to change our lives in ways that make talking bots look like mere distractions.

While we tend to equate the current artificial-intelligence boom with computers that can write, talk, code, and make pictures, most of those forms of expression are built on an underlying technology called a "transformer" that has far broader applications.

First announced in a 2017 paper from Google researchers, transformers are a kind of AI algorithm that lets computers understand the underlying structure of any heap of data—be it words, driving data, or the amino acids in a protein—so that it can generate its own similar output.

The transformer paved the way for OpenAI to launch ChatGPT two years ago, and a range of companies are now working on how to use the innovation in new ways, from Waymo and its robot taxis to a biology startup called EvolutionaryScale, whose AI systems are designing new protein molecules.

The applications of this breakthrough are so broad that in the seven years since the Google research was published, it has been cited in other scientific papers more than 140,000 times.

It's hardly an exaggeration to say that this one collection of algorithms is the reason that Nvidia is now the most valuable company on earth, that data centers are popping up all over the U.S. and the world, driving up electricity consumption and rates, and that chief executives of AI companies are often—and perhaps mistakenly—asserting that human-level AI is just around the corner.

From text translation to universal learner Humans have always acted on the conviction that the universe is full of underlying order—even if they debated whether the source of that order was divine.