EP 30 | CME295: Introduction to Transformers

We are kicking off our brand new CME295 series by going back to the breakthrough that started the current AI era. If you want a clear, foundational understanding of what a Transformer actually is and why it replaced older AI models, this is your starting point.Key Topics:The Pre-Transformer Era: Why older sequence models (like RNNs and LSTMs) bottlenecked when trying to process long paragraphs of text.The Core Intuition: What it means to process data in parallel rather than sequentially.The Attention Mechanism: A high-level look at how Transformers learn context by seeing how words relate to every other word in a sentence.Note: This is an AI-generated study resource created via NotebookLM based on the CME295 curriculum and personal study notes.