Stone to Silicon

Artificial intelligence · 2020

Vision transformer

Split an image into 16x16 patches, treat them as words, and a transformer sees.

Alexey Dosovitskiy and colleagues at Google showed that pure transformers match or beat convolutional networks on image classification when pretrained on enough data. ViTs unified vision and language architectures and underpin multimodal models.

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What it built on 2

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Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Training compute of notable AI models Source: Epoch AI, Notable AI Models (CC BY 4.0)

ML hardware FLOP/s per dollar Source: Epoch AI, ML hardware (CC BY 4.0)