Attention Is All They Need (opencv.md)

The piece uses the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need” — the technical origin of the transformer and attention mechanism that powers modern LLMs — as a cultural metaphor to critique a new founder playbook: harvesting social-media attention as an end in itself. It singles out a high-profile example (a founder dubbed Roy Lee) who leveraged outrage-driven virality to attract a preemptive $15M Series A from a top VC, arguing that attention became the primary metric for investors and startups alike. The author contends this incentive structure rewards spectacle over substance, with founders prioritizing performative stunts and follower growth instead of building robust technology or products. For the AI/ML community the significance is twofold: technically, attention remains a powerful architectural principle for LLMs; commercially and ethically, treating social attention as a substitute for product-market fit misallocates capital and distorts what it means to "build" in AI. The essay warns this meta encourages risky, sometimes exploitative behaviors, spawns low-quality or gambling-adjacent startups, and undermines long-term scaling—especially for non-consumer, enterprise, or infrastructure-focused AI projects where sustained engineering and customer trust matter more than momentary virality.