It raises an interesting question: what if we designed architectures explicitly around retrieval capabilities? Transformer architectures were designed for prediction, and retrieval emerged as a byproduct. What would an architecture optimized specfically for retrieval look like?
A lot of money has been spent on building out large-scale RAG systems. If the performance improvements promised by the paper are real, the ramifications will be huge. Exciting to see that the authors are promising to release their code - it will be fun to how this model performs on consumer hardware.