In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley dated the future from the launch of a car. The book was set in AF 632; AF stands for "Anno Fordi" or "After Ford". It starts counting from 1908 AD, the year when Ford launched the Model T into production. In the book, people say "Ford!", instead of "God!", and the cross has been cut down into a T. It's meant to be humorous. But the point here is that a society built around mass production might end up dating itself by it.
The case is not so different for us; instead of mass production, we have AI, and we haven't picked our 1908 yet.
There are a few obvious candidates, such as Turing's 1950 paper, which asked the gold question: can machines think? The 1956 Dartmouth workshop, which coined the term "Artificial Intelligence". We then have ChatGPT in November 2022, which accelerated a lot, and ChatGPT is the Model T of the AI era, in my opinion.
But AI is different in the sense that it is a collaborative result of the efforts of a lot of people, research institutions, and the compute industry, among others. It might not be wise for us to go by the Model T analogy and choose a person or a product. And we have a better alternative.
My pick is June 2017, when a team of eight researchers, mostly from Google, published the paper, "Attention Is All You Need", and it had huge downstream effects. And dating our era from a paper instead of a person or a product kind of feels right. It was an idea, written down by a team, published openly, and then scaled by anyone with a data center, that actually changed the world.
One objection to this is that the concept of "Attention" existed before 2017, and that would be correct. Some papers used the concept before (ex: Bahdanau et al.), but the 2017 paper made attention the whole architecture in a way that turned out to be scalable.
There are three reasons why I like "Attention" as an anchor:
It has a pun: Attention is the mechanism inside the model, and it's also what the economy around it harvests.
It is a good slogan, and "for Attention's sake" works as a mild curse (similar to "for Ford's sake" in the book).
It was a break. After the Transformer, scaling became the strategy, and it pulled a lot of people in.
By this count, it's After Attention 9 or AA 9.
Now, I could easily be wrong about the anchor or other things here. Yes, the anchor might be arbitrary. That's why I'd like it to stick even as a running joke, and mostly a conversation, since a calendar is more interesting if we land on it together.
So AA 9. The year of our Attention.
Credit to Dhruv Trehan for the idea of the AI-age calendar, which came up in one of our off-manifold discussions between our research at Lossfunk on November 5, 2026.
We are in AA 9.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley dated the future from the launch of a car. The book was set in AF 632; AF stands for "Anno Fordi" or "After Ford". It starts counting from 1908 AD, the year when Ford launched the Model T into production. In the book, people say "Ford!", instead of "God!", and the cross has been cut down into a T. It's meant to be humorous. But the point here is that a society built around mass production might end up dating itself by it.
The case is not so different for us; instead of mass production, we have AI, and we haven't picked our 1908 yet.
There are a few obvious candidates, such as Turing's 1950 paper, which asked the gold question: can machines think? The 1956 Dartmouth workshop, which coined the term "Artificial Intelligence". We then have ChatGPT in November 2022, which accelerated a lot, and ChatGPT is the Model T of the AI era, in my opinion.
But AI is different in the sense that it is a collaborative result of the efforts of a lot of people, research institutions, and the compute industry, among others. It might not be wise for us to go by the Model T analogy and choose a person or a product. And we have a better alternative.
My pick is June 2017, when a team of eight researchers, mostly from Google, published the paper, "Attention Is All You Need", and it had huge downstream effects. And dating our era from a paper instead of a person or a product kind of feels right. It was an idea, written down by a team, published openly, and then scaled by anyone with a data center, that actually changed the world.
One objection to this is that the concept of "Attention" existed before 2017, and that would be correct. Some papers used the concept before (ex: Bahdanau et al.), but the 2017 paper made attention the whole architecture in a way that turned out to be scalable.
There are three reasons why I like "Attention" as an anchor:
By this count, it's After Attention 9 or AA 9.
Now, I could easily be wrong about the anchor or other things here. Yes, the anchor might be arbitrary. That's why I'd like it to stick even as a running joke, and mostly a conversation, since a calendar is more interesting if we land on it together.
So AA 9. The year of our Attention.
Credit to Dhruv Trehan for the idea of the AI-age calendar, which came up in one of our off-manifold discussions between our research at Lossfunk on November 5, 2026.