# Attention Is All You Need by Vaswani et al.

14 Hacker News commenters recommended Attention Is All You Need by Vaswani et al. and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Foundational paper introducing the transformer behind modern LLMs; essential reading. Critics find the presentation hard and the encoder-decoder design dated.

## Why people recommend it

- Foundational work behind modern LLMs (5 comments): "it would be the publishing of Attention is All You Need and subsequent documentation of the transformer architecture" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46099798)) "Transformers and their attention mechanism was the major breakthrough for modern LLMs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48382277)) "This seminal work, more than any other single advance, birthed modern AI" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47378735))
- Essential reading for AI practitioners (4 comments): "if you read the foundational paper 'All you need is Attention', review the full stack trace of any LLM system call" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884396)) "landmark papers which anyone interested in the field would benefit from reading" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825889)) "It's well worth a read if you haven't gone over it yet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768936))
- Excellent original paper, highly regarded (2 comments): "I have seen maybe four papers with similar impact in the AI/ML space" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45782426)) "I found the original paper to be excellent" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873508))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [The Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ironies-of-automation.md): 14 recommend
- [MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters by Dean and Ghemawat](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mapreduce.md): 6 recommend
- [Transformer Circuits Thread](https://hackerapproved.com/p/transformer-circuits-thread.md): 5 recommend
- [DeepSeek R1 paper](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-r1-paper.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Attention Is All You Need by Vaswani et al.", https://hackerapproved.com/p/attention-is-all-you-need/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).