Breaking Down The AI Transformer
IBM News, Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
A new open-source web-based tool designed at IBM Research and Georgia Tech lets you interactively explore the neural network architecture that started the modern AI boom.
It can be easy to mistake the fluent stream of text flowing from a large language model as magic. The point of Transformer Explainer is to show that it's not. 'The model is just learning how to make a probability distribution,' said IBM's Benjamin Hoover.
Hoover is an AI engineer at IBM Research who co-designed the open-source and interactive Transformer Explainer with a team at Georgia Tech, where he's also studying for a PhD in machine learning. The team's goal was to give non-experts a hands-on introduction to what goes on under the hood of a transformer-based language model, which learns from large-scale data how to mimic human-generated text.