Attention Is All You Need. Twice.

The strange thing about the LLM era is that it has made building easier without making business easier. A single person can now take an idea much further than they could a few years ago. Coding is faster, research is faster, and the first draft of almost everything is cheaper. But this leverage is available to everyone. The result is not less competition. It is a flood of competent products fighting for the same limited amount of human attention.

That is why the title Attention Is All You Need now feels relevant in two different ways. In an LLM, attention helps the model decide which parts of its context matter. In business, marketing determines whether a product gets a chance to matter at all. A useful product that nobody notices receives no users, no feedback, and no revenue. It may be good, but from the market’s point of view, it barely exists.

For a long time, builders treated marketing as the work that began after the real work was finished. You built the product, polished it, and eventually announced it. That model is becoming obsolete. Marketing is not just promotion. It is how a business learns what people care about, how they describe their problems, what they ignore, what they share, and what they are willing to pay for. Those reactions are not separate from product development; they are among its most valuable inputs.

This is why LLMs and marketing belong together. LLMs are becoming the production engine of a modern business, while marketing is becoming its distribution and sensing engine. One allows a small team to create and test far more ideas. The other tells that team which ideas deserve to survive. The useful loop is no longer to build privately for months and then hope people care. It is to build, put the work in front of people, observe the response, and use that response to decide what comes next.

A business that understands LLMs but ignores marketing can produce an impressive amount of invisible work. A business that understands marketing but has nothing useful behind it may capture attention briefly, but it will not keep it. The durable advantage comes from combining the two: using machines to create value at unusual speed, then earning enough human attention to discover whether that value actually matters.

Attention is not literally everything a business needs. It still has to become trust, retention, and revenue. But it is the first gate. The machine has to pay attention well enough to help create something useful, and people have to pay attention long enough to discover that it is useful.

Attention is all you need. Twice.