Watch 👆🏼

This is one of those things I wasn’t sure if I should even send—most people won’t get it, and that’s fine. But I’ve been down this rabbit hole for weeks, and if you’re a bit nerdy and care about patterns, you’re gonna want to read this.

All technology quietly solves for one thing: attention. I started connecting dots and couldn’t stop. Here’s what blew me away.

Google didn’t win with a better search box. I learned recently how it actually worked. They treated links as votes—”this page deserves your time.” But not just any votes. A link from a site everyone links to?

That vote was worth 100 from random blogs. They called it PageRank. Attention from important places flowed to even more important places. Whoever captured collective human attention got ranked higher.

Boom—new economy.

Meta made it real-time. No waiting for links to pile up. They measured you—seconds your eyes stayed, likes you tapped, scrolls you stopped. Content that grabbed attention harder got pushed to more people. Same game: attention decides winners. But now it’s instant, addictive, and scales to billions.

Then I read the paper that created modern AI. The title? “Attention Is All You Need.”

The literal breakthrough behind ChatGPT is named after the same principle.

Old AI read sentences word-by-word, like a clunky toddler. Transformers said: screw that.Instead of sequence, they built attention into the math.

Picture this: give it “The cat sat on the mat because it was tired.” The model doesn’t guess what “it” means. It scans the whole sentence and decides—oh, “it” connects strongest to “cat” and “tired.” How? It runs quick math on every word pairing, figures out relevance weights, blends them. Parallel, fast, scales forever.

Attention isn’t a tactic for AI. It’s how intelligence gets built.

Google proxied it. Meta measured it. AI computes it. Same thread.
Here’s your one principle to rule them all:

Ask “Where’s the attention?” before you build, market, or sell anything.

You owe it to yourself to be Great!
Serge