Reading: Vaswani et al., Attention Is All You Need

Vaswani, Shazeer, Parmar, Uszkoreit, Jones, Gomez, Kaiser, Polosukhin, 'Attention Is All You Need,' NeurIPS (2017).

The founding paper of the modern era. Fifteen pages that define the architecture behind every frontier model. Read Section 3 (Model Architecture) with a diagram open. Read Section 4 for why attention won.