The attention economy

This chapter explores the concept of attention in both urban environments and AI language models. I examine how attention influences perception and interaction with urban spaces. The chapter discusses attention as a critical component of AI models, particularly in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, that use attention mechanisms to determine the importance of words in a sentence for generating coherent responses. It also explains multi-head attention, where multiple patterns of attention allow LLMs to handle linguistic ambiguity and context. Drawing parallels with urban planning, I illustrate how diverse attentional perspectives might contribute to collaborative decision-making.