Decoder-Only Transformers In this article, we will explore decoder-only transformers . Decoder-only transformers are a specific type of transformer architecture used in systems like ChatGPT. Masked Self-Attention Decoder-only transformers use a mechanism called masked self-attention . Masked self-attention works by measuring how similar each word is to itself and to the words that come before it in the sentence. For example: “The pizza came out of the oven and it tasted good.” When processing the word “pizza” , masked self-attention only considers the preceding word “The” . Key Difference Unlike standard self-attention, masked self-attention does not allow a word to look at future words . It can only attend to the current word and the words that come before it. Because of this, it is also called an auto-regressive method . An auto-regressive method is a way of predicting values step by step, where each prediction depends on the previous outputs.…