…Still Using Transformers? Here’s Why You’re Already Falling Behind

Author(s): R. Thompson (PhD)

Originally published on Towards AI.

How a physics-inspired breakthrough just solved AI’s $19.9 trillion quadratic problem — and why every tech leader should pay attention

Picture this: You’re watching the latest AI-generated video, and it suddenly stutters. The characters freeze mid-motion, the background glitches, and you’re left staring at digital artifacts instead of seamless content. What you’re witnessing isn’t just a rendering bug — it’s a foundational bottleneck of AI’s favorite architecture. What many still dismiss as a GPU hiccup is actually an architectural fracture rooted deep in the computational heart of the Transformer.

The article discusses the limitations of the Transformer architecture in AI, particularly how its O(n²) complexity creates bottlenecks when processing long, complex inputs. It highlights recent breakthroughs from MIT’s HAN Lab which introduce a new radial attention mechanism that drastically improves efficiency by applying principles of energy decay to attention. The results are significant, allowing AI models to handle longer inputs at a fraction of the cost and time, while also enhancing overall performance across various applications, including video generation and healthcare.

Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI