The State Space Model Revolution, with Albert Gu

Nathan hosts Albert Gu, assistant professor at CMU and co-founder of Cartesia AI, to discuss the groundbreaking Mamba architecture. In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, we explore the state space model revolution, diving into the technical details of Mamba and Mamba 2. Join us for an insightful conversation on the future of AI architectures and their potential to transform the field.
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00:00) About the Show
(00:05:39) State Space Models
(00:13:05) Intuition and inspiration
(00:18:27) Surprises
(00:22:33) Sponsors: Oracle | Brave
(00:24:41) Biological inspiration
(00:25:19) MAMBA breakthrough
(00:30:59) How does the state work?
(00:36:44) What is the size of the state?
(00:39:05) Training vs. Inference (Part 1)
(00:42:04) Sponsors: Omneky | Squad
(00:43:51) Training vs. Inference (Part 2)
(00:43:51) Sequence Models
(00:49:20) Mamba inference
(00:57:53) Mamba2 vs Mamba1
(01:16:05) Overtraining and the future of SSMs
(01:17:44) Training efficiency vs inference efficiency
(01:20:52) Hybrid models
(01:25:04) Scaling Attention Layers
(01:30:23) Optimizing State
(01:34:09) The extrapolation abilities of the SSMs
(01:36:37) Sequence parallelism with Mamba 2
(01:39:20) Why are you publishing all this?
(01:40:46) Cartesia and Together
(01:41:54) Outro

[@mkamp]

That’s an awesome episode. Very high information density. I am constantly rewinding to hear again the exact framing of questions and answers.

[@wwkk4964]

Albert is the man! Thank you!

[@augmentos]

That was a 2time watch

[@mkamp]

When Albert says, multiple times, that they avoid to materialize the state, it sounds that they don’t materialize the state at all during the forward pass in training.
Does he mean that exactly? Or that they avoid to materialize the full state at once, but materialize the whole state incrementally, chunk by chunk?

[@mkamp]

1:15 Albert says that doubling the state size in Mamba 1 doubles the wall clock time. Also, that in Mamba 2 much of the computation is not contingent on the state size.
Why the latter? Computation time is constant because it’s one matmul happening in parallel as one step on the GPU?

[@charliesteiner2334]

This one was a good'un.

[@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast]

Thanks. Mamba🐍😄!