Attention Is All You Need. It Always Was.
The one word that explains Google, Facebook, and everything that comes next.
I’m listening to Chamath Palihapitiya on Rogan … one of those rambling three-hour podcasts where they go from UBI to farming to whether we’re living in a simulation … and he says something that stops me mid-walk.
He’s trying to name the through-line. Not between companies. Between eras. What connects Google to Facebook to whatever’s coming next.
His answer is one word.
Attention.
And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
Stay with me here
So think about what Google actually built. It wasn’t a search engine. It was a machine that priced human attention for the first time in history.
Before Google, attention was unmeasured. You put an ad in the newspaper and hoped someone saw it. You bought a billboard and guessed. Google made a glance into something you could buy at auction.
That was the real move. Not “organising the world’s information.” Pricing the world’s curiosity.
Every search query is basically a tiny confession. I want to know about this. And Google figured out how to charge someone else for being in the room when you said it.
Facebook took the next step. Google priced attention at the moment of intent — you typed something in, you wanted something. Facebook figured out how to hold your attention without you ever needing to want anything specific. You didn’t go there to search. You went because the feed already knew what would keep you scrolling.
Two companies. Two decades. Same raw material.
Here’s where it gets weird
In 2017, a group of researchers at Google published a paper. If you follow AI at all, you’ve probably heard of it. It introduced the architecture that eventually became GPT, Claude, Gemini … basically everything.
The title of the paper: Attention Is All You Need.
Now. I know that’s a technical term. The paper describes an “attention mechanism” …the way a model decides which parts of an input actually matter. Which words to focus on, which to skip. It’s why an LLM can read a long messy prompt and somehow respond to the bit that’s relevant.
But... come on.
Google built a business on pricing human attention. Facebook built a business on capturing it. And then the paper that kicked off the entire AI era …written at Google , literally says: attention is all you need.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s the thesis statement of the entire tech era and nobody seems to have read it that way.
What I can’t stop thinking about
For 20 years, the whole game was harvesting your attention and selling it. Your eyeballs, your scrolling, your clicks … you were the product. Everyone knows this. We’ve been saying it since 2010.
But here’s the thing. The machines have now learned to pay attention themselves.
That’s what a transformer actually does. It doesn’t just crunch through words one by one like the old models. It looks at everything at once and decides, on its own, what matters. It attends.
And that’s... kind of a big deal? Because the breakthrough wasn’t really about speed or scale. It was that the machine learned to do the thing we’d been selling all along.
Google priced our attention. Facebook held it. And now AI can just... do it. By itself. It can read your emails, summarise your meetings, draft your strategy docs. Not because it’s fast. Because it pays attention better than you do.
It doesn’t get distracted. Doesn’t doom-scroll. Doesn’t check its phone mid-sentence.
Rogan says something during the same episode about what people actually did before the 9-to-5 existed … farming, trades, stuff that was brutal but yours. And it hit me: those people didn’t sell their attention for a living. That’s a new thing. The idea that your most valuable economic contribution is paying attention to things … that’s maybe 25 years old.
And the machines already do it better.
So where does that leave us?
I keep stacking the eras up in my head:
Search - you get attention at the moment of need. Social - you manufacture the moment. Mobile - you get attention everywhere, all the time. AI - you don’t need human attention at all. The machine has its own.
That last one is the weird one. It’s like running a coal-powered factory for fifty years and then one day the factory figures out how to make its own energy. The coal doesn’t disappear. It just stops being the point.
We spent twenty years complaining that technology was destroying our attention spans.
Turns out it was studying them.
Cheers, Jagger
Great read. Really captures the essence of what attention is in today's digital age