[hansonw]

“RNN-mode inference” is also extremely exciting because you can precompute the hidden state of any prompt prefix (i.e. a long system prompt, or statically retrieved context) and continued generations pay the same cost irrespective of the prefix length.

[shikon7]

But this also means that possible information retained is constant irrespective of the prefix length. This might be a problem if the prefix is composed of essentially uncompressable data.

[hansonw]

Indeed: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01032.pdf Perhaps future iterations of SSMs will accommodate dynamically sized (but still non-linearly-growing) hidden states / memories!