I’ve been following an interesting discussion online about what constitutes the most important AI paper of the decade, and it’s got me thinking about how we measure scientific breakthroughs and give credit where it’s due. The paper in question? “Attention Is All You Need” by Vaswani et al., published in 2017 - the one that introduced the transformer architecture that’s now powering everything from ChatGPT to the latest Google search improvements.

Reading Nick Bostrom’s latest comments about superintelligent AI potentially emerging within two years really got me thinking during my morning commute on the 96 tram. The whole “it could happen any moment now” narrative feels uncomfortably familiar - reminiscent of those endless fusion power predictions we’ve been hearing since the 1950s.

The idea that a single “key insight” in some lab could suddenly unlock superintelligence seems remarkably simplistic. Working in tech for over two decades has taught me that breakthrough moments are rarely that dramatic. They’re usually built on countless incremental improvements, failed attempts, and collaborative efforts across multiple teams and organizations.