
quantamagazine.org
October 14, 2026
12 min read
48/100
Summary
Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence? Introduction Everything that’s swept the world since the 2022 release of ChatGPT — “the AI economy”; data centers; chatbots acting as best friends, doctors, and mathematicians; talk of existential risk — it all starts, in some sense, with an intern in a University of Montreal lab named Dzmitry Bahdanau. It was 2014. The 23-year-old Belarusian, who had be...