How Transformers Actually Work: Attention, Tokens, and Context

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · May 3, 2026 · 33m

Most of us know "Attention Is All You Need" changed everything — but what actually happens under the hood? This episode breaks down the transformer architecture from the ground up: how self-attention creates direct connections between every word pair simultaneously, why tokens aren't words, and how learned query-key-value vectors let models resolve pronouns, track syntax, and build context-dependent meaning. We cover why transformers scale so well with GPUs, how they avoid the "game of telephone" problem that plagued recurrent networks, and why the same architecture powering ChatGPT also…