Internal vector recurrence is more or less what the Universal Transformer paper proposes. This recent paper does so by sharing the transformer weights in a single recurrence setup: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22083, and this one does so at a per-token level: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10524
I agree with you about not trusting Big Ai. I'm amazed that so much of HN is repeating the same darling -> demon with OpenAi/Anthropic that we did last decade with other SV darlings. Humans are forgetful beings