Hacker News Reader

Comment by parrit | Hacker News Reader

So if you now hide my original comment and try to recall what I said, do you know it word for word (and are thinking if every word, e.g. did I use one or 2 spaces somewhere as that would change tokens) or do you have a rough concept of what I said?

OTOH if you had to remember a phone number to write it down, how does that differ?

View on HN

I think in a way it makes transformers superior to humans, their short term memory is much more powerful =) Supporting extra long contexts also make transformers super human. Because, again, human's short term memory is exactly this - short term. And much shorter than millions of tokens we expect from models nowadays.

As for SSMs - I think they compress model memory state way too much. Mixed global/local attention layers do just as well. And sparse/block attention seems like a way forward much more (https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11089).

> And much shorter than millions of tokens we expect from models nowadays.

Yet all current model still suck above 32k. (Yes some can do needle in a haystack fine, but they still fail at anything even slightly more complex over a long context).

32k is still much higher than humans' though, so I agree with you that it gives them some kind of super human abilities over moderately long context, but they are still disappointingly bad over longer context.

Out of curiosity I estimated per day context size (of text only!) by multiplying reading speed by number of minutes: 16 * 60 * 300 = 288000 words ~ 288000 tokens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com