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What is Attention?

P10.attention.01 · Audience: guest, it-ml, language-pro

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Step 1 / 3Where we are in the pipeline

By the end of Blocks 4–5, every word of the sentence has become a vector that encodes what the word means (its SVD embedding) and where it stands (its positional encoding). The whole sentence is one matrix — one row per word, d_model numbers per row.

Computing…

But every row is still context-blind: the vector for bank is identical in "river bank" and "savings bank". The question Attention answers is:

For each word, which other words matter right now — and how do we mix their meanings into its representation?
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