Comment by flor1s

I'm not sure if it's truly a timeless paper, but "Attention is all you need" by Vaswani et al. has been super influential in recent years. Also "Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics" by Sohl-Dickstein et al. (about Diffusion Models) and "NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis" by Mildenhall et al. were hugely influential to me.