The Impact Initiative
A 6-month leadership development journey for the leaders who shape what comes next. Read deeply, think critically, lead boldly.
From foundations to the future of leadership
Essays, papers, lectures, and books from leading thinkers
Build your AI leadership voice and bring it to your team
The Risks
What could go wrong
Before we can evaluate AI's risks, we need to understand the architecture that made it all possible — and then confront the critiques of what it's become. This month pairs the foundational paper behind every modern AI system with a landmark critique of where it all went wrong.
Attention Is All You Need
Vaswani, Shazeer, Parmar, et al.
The 2017 paper that started it all. A team at Google introduced the Transformer — the architecture behind GPT, Claude, and every major AI system today. You don't need to understand the math to grasp the key insight: by letting a model attend to all parts of an input at once, they unlocked a new era of AI capability.
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots
Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al.
The paper that shook Google and became a touchstone for AI ethics. Bender and Gebru argue that large language models carry environmental costs, encode biases, and create an illusion of understanding that can cause real harm.