alt Hacker NewsWell, I know this is possible because I have built things that work just like it is promising to do. The two key technologies needed are:
- guided window attn. Predict where to attend to but in a fixed window. If you do this to just the token/vocab you can keep effectively unlimited context and perfect recall. (yes, I can do that. There is a trick to teaching it how to predict position. This also immediately opens other crazy things like NN memory)
-efficient fixed state size models. So not a recurrent mechanism because that breaks training, parallelizable like transformers, but fixed sized state instead of unbounded attn. Pick a reasonable amount of state and it is amazingly good since it doesn't need to keep separating wheat fro chaff in context (yes, it is possible to build this, I have. It works. This also opens up real streamed models. I have a true infinite context streamed model I toy with locally that I am getting to be audio/text in and audio/text out in real time.)
Put those together and you have O(1) token gen, infinite context and perfect recall. It is a whole new world of models. You can interact with a model until you have it at the state you want and then save its state and use that as if it were your system prompt. Batches pack perfectly so inference is massively more efficient. Training is massively more efficient. Transformer and unlimited attn models are a dead end. But how do you make money on this as an independent researcher? If I release the Two Weird Tricks this is all based on I get zip and the big players get even more tech for free. If I keep it all secret I get Zip and eventually the tricks will be figured out. (Yes a little frustration here) If anyone wants the model architecture of the future make me an offer :)
Replies
It's not quite true to say that if you release it you get nothing. If it's worthwhile and picked up by the open-weights labs, you get much bigger and better models implementing it than you would have had access to or been able to train otherwise, quicker than if they had to figure it out de novo.
I´m super curious about those "Two Weird Tricks". I would like that you would release more. It remember me the MiniMax Sparse Attention https://arxiv.org/html/2606.13392v1
Isn't the classic way of making money off an invention is to patent it... so why not patent those "Two Weird Tricks"?
As a follow-up, I can see there is not a lot of belief which is why it is also hard to find a company to partner with on this. So, how -do- you make money on something like this as an independent researcher. Maybe I release trick one, show how guided window attn (and nn memory and probably a lot of robotics) can be trained? Thoughts? I can do that pretty quickly. By itself that is a pretty great tech (combined with fixed windows of full attn it is pretty amazing). The second trick, I think, is a bit more powerful although both are general purpose. If I do this, think people will believe trick two (and all the real time multi-modal streaming stuff)?