One Transformer Layer
All the steps you have learned so far come together inside a single transformer layer.
Overview
One layer, several small steps
You have met tokens, position, attention, the thinking step, residual connections, and normalization. A transformer layer simply runs them in order and hands the improved tokens to the next layer.
Playground
Walk the sentence through one layer
The sentence "The cat chased the mouse." enters one transformer layer. Press Next step to move through it, one step at a time.
Press Next step to send the sentence into the layer, one step at a time.
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What happens inside one layer?
Find, refine, pass on
One transformer layer takes token representations, finds relationships, refines meaning, and passes improved representations to the next layer.
Simple layer summary
The layer at a glance
Input Tokens
Position
Attention
Add & Normalize
Thinking Step
Add & Normalize
Output Tokens
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Key takeaways
- • A transformer layer has multiple small steps.
- • Attention finds relationships between words.
- • The thinking step refines each token.
- • Residual connections preserve useful information.
- • Layer normalization keeps processing stable.
- • One layer improves the token representations.