This post was originally published by [email protected] (Carl Franzen) on Venture Beat.
When the transformer architecture was introduced in 2017 in the now seminal Google paper “Attention Is All You Need,” it became an instant cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence.
Every major large language model (LLM) — from OpenAI’s GPT series to Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama — has been built on some variation of its central mechanism: attention, the mathematical operation that allows a model to look back across its entire input and decide what information matters most.
Eight years later, the same mechanism that defined AI’s golden age is now showing its limits. Attention is powerful, but it is
