i know you're jesting but RNNs are recursive along the sequence length where I am describing recursion along the depth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_neural_network
Well ish. The article above explains that Recursive-NNs are hierarchical whereas RNNs are linear. I guess the distinction is a little on the fine side.
Anyway carry on. Pedantic moment over.
We can often trace back successful projects to failed precursors, but often the people behind the successful project are not even familiar with the failed precursor and the 'connection to the past' only really occurs in retrospect. See the 'adjoint state method' and connections with backprop.
Once the dust has settled, there are often much clearer through lines than in looked like at the time. It's hard to see when you are on the moving front though.
RNNs are a large class of architectures of varying complexity, from Kallman Filters to LSTMs. It's not clear to me exactly what the wikipedia article means by "linear" but LSTMs for example treat their inputs as sequences and don't try to deconstruct them into parts, like e.g. Convolutional Neural Nets do. So maybe that's what's meant by "linear".
Why assume I know little and leave snarky comments (and basically a repetition of the prior joke at that, subbing RNN for transformer)?
Because text has less bandwidth than almost any other medium, certain forms of humor are much more likely to be understood (in this case, your "gentle playfulness" was taken to be snark, sarcasm, and point scoring).
If you insist on using this and similar forms of humor that, ordinarily, depend quite strongly on intonation to convey intent, you'll have to be much more explicit to avoid being misunderstood. You are going to have actually state your intent explicitly as part of your communication. This need not entirely destroy the humor, for example, you might try something like this:
And so I say to you (playfully, sir, playfully): etc.
Or this:
Yadda yadda yadda. (I kid, I kid!)
The Internet-native forms of this are the humble ;-) or the newer j/k, but I find that it is all too easy to overlook a 3-character sequence, particularly if the passage being so marked is even as long as a single paragraph, but they can serve their purpose when used for the commonplace one-liner.