Attention Is All You Need (2025) (blogs.lse.ac.uk)

The piece links the foundational 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" — which introduced the attention mechanism and learned weights that power modern LLMs — to a broader geopolitical and economic warning: AI’s rise is entrenching US Big Tech dominance and deepening Europe’s dependence on American infrastructure, data flows and capital. It highlights how attention-driven systems are already fed by real‑time bidding and bulk data from brokers, a model supported by US policy. With US firms pouring ~$300 billion into AI in 2025 and global AI/data‑centre investment forecast at $1.5 trillion, a few companies (OpenAI/Microsoft, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, Google) risk concentrating compute, personal data and persuasive capabilities — including the likely future embedding of advertising directly inside AI assistants. For the EU the stakes are strategic and technical: roughly 80% of Europe’s digital stack is imported, creating security and sovereignty risks and locking citizens’ data into foreign platforms. The author argues for targeted decoupling — not total isolation — through a sovereign “Euro cloud,” more EU data‑centre and infrastructure investment, a dedicated EU Tech Fund, interoperability mandates, and reforms to budget, energy and regulatory policy to enable scale. The piece stresses that without independent infrastructure and capital, GDPR/AI Act protections won’t prevent surveillance capitalism or ensure Europe captures AI’s productivity gains.