#Natural Language Processing

The story of the deep learning revolution from the AlexNet moment through the development of the Transformer, told as a narrative of rapid, cascading discovery in which one breakthrough enabled the next. The fastest scientific revolution in the history of AI — and what it actually means that machines can now do what only humans could do before.

The full story of the 'Attention Is All You Need' paper — how a Google Brain team developed a new architecture for sequence modelling that discarded recurrence entirely, why it worked better than everything that came before, and how it became the foundation for every large language model in existence. The paper that made GPT possible, and the elegant idea at its heart.

The deeper story behind the world's first chatbot — what ELIZA revealed about human psychology, the nature of language, and the gap between the appearance of understanding and its reality. We go beyond the famous chatbot story to the philosophical questions it raised, and why those questions matter more than ever in the age of large language models.

In 1966 a simple pattern-matching program became the world's first chatbot — and people fell in love with it, told it their secrets, and begged not to have it turned off. Its creator was horrified. The story of ELIZA, the DOCTOR persona, and what a program that understood nothing revealed about the human need to be heard.