Part 9/15:
The Transformer Era and Pretrained Language Models
Transformers transformed NLP, leading to pretrained models like BERT ("Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers") and GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer). These models are trained on massive datasets—think of the internet's trillions of words—by predicting the next token or filling masked words, capturing rich language representations.
Transfer learning became a key strategy: models trained on broad data could be fine-tuned for specific tasks with relatively small datasets. This approach accelerated AI development, leading to models that excel at tasks ranging from translation to summarization.