One 2017 Paper Became the Foundation of Modern AI Deployment

Ashish Vaswani and colleagues' "Attention Is All You Need," published in June 2017, introduced the transformer architecture now underlying virtually every deployed large language model. The paper restructured the entire commercial AI industry within five years—a velocity of impact unusual even by modern ML standards. IEEE Spectrum's June 2026 AI at 70 retrospective identified it as the most structurally consequential of the decade's most influential papers.