Attention

A mechanism that lets each token weigh how relevant other tokens are to it, then mix in their information.

Language models handle this with attention: each token (a word or a piece of a word; the next lesson shows how text is split up) looks back at the tokens before it and decides how much each one matters right now.
From Attention, step “What does “it” mean?”

See it in action

Try attention hands-on in the lesson Attention, part of the AI fundamentals course.

Open the lesson