Before Illia Polosukhin left Google in 2017, he had a brainstorming lunch and then returned to his desk to build what may have been the very first transformer, the neural network architecture that makes generative artificial intelligence possible. Seven of the "Transformer 8" joined Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at GTC, Nvidia's annual developer conference in San Jose on March 20, 2024. From left to right: Lukasz Kaiser, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Jensen Huang, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani and Illia Polosukhin. All eight of the authors have now left Google, although Polosukhin was the first to depart. Watch the video to hear the full conversation between CNBC's Katie tarasov and and Illia Polosukhin.

---

Persons: Polosukhin, Jensen Huang, Illia Polosukhin, Lukasz Kaiser, Noam Shazeer, Aidan Gomez, Llion Jones, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ashish Vaswani, OpenAI, Alexander Skidanov, CNBC's Katie tarasov, Illia Organizations: Nvidia, Google, CNBC Locations: San Jose