What is Transformer Architecture?

How it works

The transformer architecture is the foundation of virtually all modern AI models, including both language models (GPT, Claude) and visual generation models. Transformers process sequences of tokens using attention mechanisms, allowing them to capture relationships between any elements in the sequence regardless of distance. In AI video generation, transformers process sequences of visual tokens (representing image patches) alongside text tokens (representing your prompt). The architecture's ability to model long-range dependencies makes it particularly effective for video, where maintaining consistency across many frames requires understanding the global context of the generation. Most modern video generators, including Runway Gen-4 and Veo 3.1, use transformer-based architectures.