Maybe All You Need Is the Friends You Made Along the Way

Abstract

Since 2017, the “X Is All You Need” title construction convention in machine learning has been all paper authors have needed to avoid expending precious mental energy introducing their contributions to the field. Indeed, over 300 such papers have been published between 2017 and 2025. The set of things claimed to be “all you need” is large enough to be self-evidently self-contradictory and yet is still growing. Among the things that are purportedly all you need: attention, patches, morphisms, Hopfield networks, a 23-megawatt data center, sex, propaganda, dreaming, procrastination, a dictator, and pretraining on the test set (the latter result somewhat undermining the gravitas of the form). We present an empirical and philosophical analysis of the phenomenon and conclude with recommendations (“please stop”). We further demonstrate, via an argument we concede proves its own futility, that the question “what is all you need?” is not merely unanswered but formally unanswerable. Naturally, we do not resolve this. We are, however, quite pleased with it.

1. Introduction

In 2017, Vaswani et al. (2017) published “Attention Is All You Need” introducing the transformer architecture. Their contribution proved genuinely transformative (a word we use in both the colloquial and the algebraic senses, the latter of which the authors would presumably prefer) and the paper has since been cited over 173,000 times, ranking it amongst the 10 most cited papers of the 21st century so far and sharing its infamy with historic milestones of scientific progress like cancer genomics and the Higgs boson, neither of which had the temerity to claim that a single mechanism was all you need.

The title proved arguably (but arguably not convincingly) more consequential than the architecture. It launched a naming convention that has since metastasized across the field with concerning vigour. As of early 2026, a curated repository (Nishi, 2024) tracking papers with “all you need” in their titles contains over 300 entries.

Academic paper titles are, at their best, one of the most rewarding literary forms available to scientists. In fewer than twenty words (for the reasonable authors among us) one must attempt conveying the domain, hinting at the result, distinguishing from prior work, and making the reader want to cancel their afternoon meetings. Bonus points are available for effective SEO and elegant wordplay. A great title is a miniature work of art.

This paper asks two questions. First, can we please stop using the all you need title template? And second, does advocating against the depressing futility and lack of imagination of the titular template while adopting the very convention we are critiquing undermine our fundamental thesis? We will not fully answer this question. We will however be very precise about the ways in which we fail.

2. The title of the art

Paper titles have been a source of creativity and elegant intellectual achievement for much of humanity’s post-Renaissance trajectory1. Consider Einstein’s understated masterpiece of special relativity “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (Einstein, 1905). Or Turing’s world-record lede-burying sub-clause introduction of the Halting problem in “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Turing, 1936). Claude Shannon’s foundation of information theory was merely entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (Shannon, 1948)—the indefinite article “A” doing some heavy lifting permitting other such theories, and not even for a moment hinting that the theory therein described might be exhaustive with respect to one’s information theoretical needs. “Reflections on Trusting Trust” (Thompson, 1984); “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” (Dijkstra, 1968). To the point, descriptive, a gold standard for science communication. “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly” (Oppenheimer, 2006), “You Probably Think This Paper’s About You: Narcissists’ Perceptions of Their Personality and Reputation” (Carlson et al., 2011), “Carbon Monoxide: To Boldly Go Where NO Has Gone Before” (Ryter et al., 2004). Some titles intrigue, some provoke, some delight. All carry specific information about the work they describe, and they help the reader decide in mere seconds whether this paper is relevant to their interests or not.

The very best titles, in our opinion, engender the Ig Nobel philosophy: they make you laugh, and then they make you think. “Object Personification in Autism: This Paper Will Be Very Sad If You Don’t Read It” (White & Remington, 2019), for example, or “Will Any Crap We...