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November 20, 2023·5 min read read

What Is AttentionDB? Salience-Based Memory For AI Systems

TechnicalMemory ArchitectureAttentionDBAI Infrastructure

What Is AttentionDB?

If you're building AI-enabled tools, you've probably run into this: you ask your system a question, and it spits out five paragraphs that seem vaguely related, but none actually answer what you asked.

This isn't an accident. It's the result of a memory stack that was never built to reason.

Vector Search Is Not Memory

The vast majority of LLM "memory" solutions today are powered by vector databases. They measure semantic similarity — cosine distance between dense representations of chunks.

This is great if you're searching FAQs. But if you're navigating a codebase, tracing a logic chain, or auditing policy, it's almost useless.

You don't need something that looks similar. You need the right thing. You need structure. You need salience.

AttentionDB: Built on Relevance, Not Just Proximity

AttentionDB is the engine that powers Attixa. Instead of matching fuzzy vectors, it builds salience graphs: structured representations of your data that prioritize what matters, not just what sounds similar.

This means:

Salience Isn't Optional Anymore

We're leaving the prototype era of AI. We're now building systems that live in production, that touch money, users, critical infrastructure.

And those systems need memory that doesn't guess.

They need memory that focuses.

That's why we built AttentionDB.

Allan Livingston

Allan Livingston

Founder of Attixa

Allan is the founder of Attixa and a longtime builder of AI infrastructure and dev tools. He's always dreamed of a better database ever since an intern borrowed his favorite DB systems textbook, read it in the bathroom, and left it on the floor. His obsession with merging database paradigms goes way back to an ill-advised project to unify ODBC and hierarchical text retrieval. That one ended in stack traces and heartbreak. These scars now fuel his mission to build blazing-fast, salience-aware memory for agents.