TechnicalAI glossary
Mamba / state-space models
Alternative architecture to the Transformer: the model reads text sequentially while maintaining a summarised memory, so its cost grows proportionally to text length instead of exploding. Promising on paper, it has yet to dethrone the Transformer, whose ecosystem and results remain dominant.
In other words
A reader who takes notes as they go through the book and keeps only their summary, instead of rereading all the previous pages with each new sentence.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- SubQ: the startup that may have killed the transformer
Since 2017 and the publication of the paper "Attention is All You Need", every major AI model has been based on the transformer architecture. SubQ, launched on 5 May 2026, is the first commercial model to break with this paradigm. Here is what changes technically, and why the AI community is deeply divided over the implications.