Stanford CS25: Transformers United V6 I On the Tradeoffs of State Space Models and Transformers
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youtube.com
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Stanford Online
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Why it matters
Gu lays out where state space models and transformers each win, which informs choices about long-context windowThe maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.Full definition → efficiency, hybrid architectures and inferenceRunning a trained model to get answers — the phase where AI is actually used, as opposed to trained.Full definition → cost.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
attention — The mechanism that lets a model weigh which earlier words matter for the word it's currently processing — the core operation of a transformer.
context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.
inference — Running a trained model to get answers — the phase where AI is actually used, as opposed to trained.