invention of transformer was not pivotal, those t2t guys who authored paper couldn't achieve any quality improvements over other SOTAs at that time. Pivotal mo

invention of transformer was not pivotal, those t2t guys who authored paper couldn't achieve any quality improvements over other SOTAs at that time. Pivotal moment was BERT, which demonstrated that with some additions transformer can achieve very significant improvements, and inventor is still at google, and transformer creators got lot of hype from that. Also, most important part is attention, which also was not invented at google.