A transformer is a deep learning model introduced in the paper “Attention is All You Need”. It uses self-attention mechanisms and has been adopted for a variety of tasks in natural language processing (NLP). FasterTransformer is an open source library that can make transformer models faster and more efficient. Developed by NVIDIA, it is a highly optimized model library that supports transformer architectures including BERT, GPT2, GPT-J, and T5. It aims to accelerate transformer inference, which is crucial in NLP tasks like translation, text generation, and summarization.